Cognitive Permaculture ~ Neurowild Mind ~ Soul Care

Cognitive Permaculture

Mind is not inside the head. We are inside mind.

Permaculture is a means of designing and embodying complex, dynamic, intelligent, creative, and adaptive living systems that work with the holistic laws of nature rather than against nature. It is essentially indigenous TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) adapted to modern, industrial contexts.

Despite the hype around artificial intelligence and "smart" devices these days, the reality is that the social project of civilization is fundamentally defined by its orientation against nature and the correlate belief that human need and purpose is to control, conquer, and "rise above" the "brute," "primitive" nature of the non-human world. Permaculture is a set of principles and practices that diverges from these false premises, and instead proposes that human life is optimized by our more thorough integration with the natural intelligence of living systems as they have evolved over billions of years.

All our best sciences now support this perspective -- and the evidence is beginning to dovetail with what indigenous peoples have known forever: humans are part of nature, and our unique intelligence is not in any way separate from the rest of natural intelligence. Human intelligence is optimized to the degree that we make use of our wild, instinctual nature rather than through a supposed "transcendence" of that nature. Permaculture, in a nutshell, is the practical application of this indigenous-scientific TEK.

What is Cognitive Permaculture?

Cognitive permaculture is permaculture adapted and applied to human growth and development on both the individual and collective levels. It is an approach to psychology that understands everything we call "cognitive" to be ecological phenomena. Ecological psychology, in a nutshell.

Here is just one example of this. If you look inside our brains and bodies, you will not find the "stuff" of modern psychology: concepts, ideas, beliefs, perspectives, emotions, fears, stories, etc. All these phenomena are, in the most literal sense, actually embodied, embedded, and enacted in the tangible behaviors and environments we construct and engage on a daily basis.

So, if we want to address maladaptive psychological patterns/habits, for instance, we do so not by manipulating brain states (as is characteristic of modern, pathologizing medical science and psychiatry) but by assessing and reorganizing the literal elements and activities of someone's holistic cognitive lifeworlds -- i.e., their whole life situation, not just "internal" psychic happenings. This is the essence of cognitive permaculture.

The Principles of Permaculture 

Theory and Design

Permaculture, as formally taught in certification courses around the world, revolves around a core set of ethics and principles. The core ethics are Earth care, people care, and fair share. The 12 primary principles are 1) observe and interact; 2) catch and store energy; 3) obtain a yield; 4) apply self-regulation and accept feedback; 5) use and value renewable resources; 6) produce no waste; 7) design from patterns to details; 8) integrate rather than segregate; 9) use small and slow solutions; 10) use and value diversity; 11) use edges and value the marginal; 12) creatively use and response to change.

As this design approach relates to cognitive permaculture, the key aspect is that in permaculture design, systems are arranged to accommodate and constructively utilize the wild, unpredictable elements of nature, rather than being built to resist, block, or subdue those wild elements. Just as in modern industrial design -- which constructs social infrastructure as something essentially separate and different from the natural world [i.e., modern cities feature almost entirely non-living materials with highly contrived, artificial landscaping added as an ornamental afterthought] -- modern psychology and medicine has sought to control and subdue (or repress, eliminate, exterminate) the wild, instinctual elements of human cognition in pursuit of a contrived, abstract, unnatural "normality" of thought, emotion, and behavior. Most anything outside this "normal" (and very narrow, and culturally contingent) spectrum of psychology has been marginalized and pejoratively labeled through the secular demonization of a pathologizing medical ideology.

This "abnormal" range of human experience has been labeled various things across the generations. In the past, such "deviant" cognitive orientations were called "madness," "insanity," or even "demonic possession." Today, they are lumped into vague categories of "mental illness," "disorders," and the currently-trendy "neurodivergent."

In truth, however, the cognitive styles and "norms" characteristic of civilizational cultures and now contemporary, high-tech, industrialized societies are, in the most inclusive analysis of human cultural history, literally the most anomalous, abnormal ways of thinking, communicating, and organizing social systems. For literally less than 1% of human history on Earth (thus, statistically the most anomalous and abnormal) have humans arranged themselves in the social designs, patterns, and legal-ethical-economic-political norms characteristic of modern industrial societies. It is the attempt to force ourselves to live in such extensively unnatural systems that manifests in the wide range of individual and social "pathologies" plaguing contemporary societies.

In other words, the fact that the large majority of citizens of most industrialized nations are chronically depressed, anxious, metabolically ill, and compulsively attached ("addicted") to something does not reflect a defect or fault within those people, it reflects the fact that modern industrial society is a highly unnatural, inhumane, unsustainable, and unhealthy way of living.

Reclaiming Natural Cognitive Diversity: From Neurodivergent to Neurowild

Modern industrial society -- through a comprehensive set of homogenizing, standardizing social institutions such as formal schooling, the medical industrial complex, militaries, oligarchical political systems, hierarchical and paternalistic legal systems, and the like -- conditions people to conform to a contrived, artificial "normalness" that is rewarded by acceptance into a consumer commodity economy concerned almost exclusively with increasing profit at the expense of the health and vitality of living systems, people included. Behaviors, values, perspectives, and social interests that don't fit these "norms" and efficiently serve this economic order are labeled "neurodivergent" -- which, in some ways, has been embraced more positively in recent years. Nonetheless, the term still implies that whatever is "neurodivergent" is defined by what it's not -- it's defined as that which diverges from the assumed goodness and desirability of the "norm."

As mentioned above, the irony here is that what has been paternalistically constructed as "normal" by the authoritarian, hierarchical social institutions characteristic of civilizational societies is, in truth, the most literally anomalous and abnormal manner of living in human history. What is actually normal in human existence is a wide, diverse spectrum of cognitive flavors, styles, perspectives, qualities, and tendencies.

Given this, I offer cognitive permaculture as a means of reclaiming this natural cognitive diversity as a deep basin of immense intellectual resources and capabilities, rather than a pesky complexity muddling the "pure" waters of a mechanistic mind constructed within an industrialized "control society," as James Beniger puts it. Neurowild is my term for this valuing and embracing of natural cognitive diversity, a dynamic psychological manifestation of the wild, incalculably complex diversity of life forms and intelligences characteristic of the biosphere that evolved us.

Further Reading

For further information on permaculture principles and practice, check out these sites: