Cognitive Immunology and Soul Care

Antidotes to Wétiko

What is cognitive immunology and soul care?

In a nutshell, cognitive immunology and soul care is an approach to facilitating our growth and maturation beyond the limited, overly-domesticated ego-centric mode of life all-too-common in today's competition and possession-obsessed consumerist society. It is a reclaiming of our ancient need and desire to evolve beyond mere individual survival and expand into an ecological mode of being rooted in true wisdom and an authentic belonging to Earth and the larger community of life.

In other words, it's what most people are looking for in therapy and other means of "self-improvement," but rather than seeing you as flawed and needing "fixing" or "improvement," it seeks to cultivate your innate wholeness and actualize the latent potentials we all carry within us.

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Below, I offer a much more in-depth explanation of how cognitive immunology, soul care, ecology, and wétiko all fit together.

Soul is fundamentally a biological concept, defined as the primary organizing, sustaining, and guiding principle of a living being." ~ Thomas Berry

In this context, I use the term "soul" the way that Thomas Berry and the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin use it: as referring to our ecological belonging to the more-than-human worlds of which we are evolved to be integral parts:

"Foundationally, Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing's unique ecological niche in the Earth community. ...A niche, in essence, consists of a thing's unique set of relationships with every other thing in its ecosystem. A thing's eco-niche -- its Soul -- is what makes it what it is on the deepest, widest, and most natural level of identity." - Bill Plotkin, PhD

Wetiko causes a "sickness of the soul" by disrupting the web of relations that constitutes life.

As a viral agent, wétiko has no true "relationship" with anything else in life; viruses seek merely to replicate themselves and nothing else. More specifically, they reproduce themselves at any and all costs, including causing illness and death in the host organisms that they infect. This is fundamentally different from how autopoietic living systems function. Living beings function within an ecosystem in such a way as to maintain the health of that larger community of life, because each unique form of life is dependent on a complex network of mutualistic relationships that constitute that life form's "eco-niche." So, for living organisms, the death of their ecosystem means their own death. For viruses, the death of a host organism/ecosystem is irrelevant; a virus will go on to find another host to parasitically infect.

Wétiko, as a "mind-virus," operates on multiple scales of ecosystem: from the microcosmic to individual organisms to families to social systems to species and beyond. On all levels, wétiko functions by disrupting the cognitive web of relations that constitutes an ecosystem of consciousness and replaces such interconnection with isolation and atomization. This fragmentation, in turn, manifests as a slew of harmful/toxic emotional states and qualities such as chronic fear, anxiety, pessimism, cynicism, hostility, combative anger, depression, and distrust. When these sorts of qualities come to dominate any scale of relationship (a couple, a family, a community, a nation, a species...), that social system becomes literally dis-eased and its health will degenerate.

This is where we are today as a species. Fear, anxiety, depression, cynicism, distrust, exploitation, us-versus-them, me-versus-you, mutual exclusivity, xenophobia, bigotry, hatred, oppression, erasure, marginalization, and identity-based demonization feature powerfully on the world stage of government, politics, economics, and education. It's a sad state of affairs, but we are not helpless in this situation! To think we are helpless would be a characteristic form of wétiko cognition manifest, real-time.

Enter: Cognitive Immunology and Soul Care

To effectively defend ourselves against wétiko therefore requires addressing it on these various levels. There are unique ways in which wétiko will manifest in your individual life, and you must learn to detect and respond to these manifestations.

In some cases, this is a functionally individual task. Ultimately, however, we all must engage the support of others in our joint individual-collective efforts to purge wétiko from the species' psyche. This is vitally important, because if we try to go it alone, we will necessarily fail. This is simply because one of the central characteristics of the mind virus is the illusion that we are fundamentally independent, separate individuals acting according to an untethered will responsible to nobody but oneself. Such selfishness causes a person to view the rest of the world as a mere backdrop or stage for their own life, which is positioned as the main character in the play.

In other words, wétiko just is the phenomenon of individual isolation and separation; it is the elevation of an atomistic ego and its self-serving, isolationist needs to the primary form of being. We've all met the type: the person who genuinely feels and believes that their egoic concerns and needs are the singular most important thing in any given situation, and anyone who gets in their way is an enemy worthy of malicious attack. Yikes.

A healthy organism, in contrast, exists as a complex ecosystem unto themselves that simultaneously serves a unique role within a larger ecosystem that provides and sustains the conditions necessary for that organism to live. To restore such mutually supportive relationships from a dis-eased condition of ego-driven exclusivism is the work of cognitive immunology and soul care. These terms refer to any number of processes that serve to re-balance the needs of an organism with the needs of that organism's ecosystem -- its community of life.

Thus, in soul care, we cultivate this soulful-ecological dimension of our existence precisely within and through the experience of working together to address the ways wétiko manifests uniquely in your life, your eco-niche in the world. I walk with you and you walk with me in this experience. This is heterarchical, rather than hierarchical. That is, we each maintain our sovereign authority as ultimate equals, rather than me taking a hierarchical position as the professional authority in relation to you as the non-expert client.

What Soul Care Is Not

• Soul care is not "spiritual development," it is not a path of enlightenment, and it is not religious. I am not a guru, an ordained minister, or someone who has attained a supposedly special spiritual status or "ascendance." I am, however, someone with extensive experience wrestling wétiko, and precisely for this reason I remain tethered closely to Earth and I live embedded in the tangible tangle of messy human reality as a professional in ecological restoration and permaculture landscaping.
• Soul care is not theological, doctrinal, or dogmatic. Anyone, from any spiritual, religious, atheist, agnostic, or cultural tradition can practice soul care.
• Soul care is not a special or proprietary process relevant only to certain people; rather, it is the most natural way of being a human on Earth, in the sense that it is basically the intentional engagement of a life-long process of holistic growth, maturation, and wisdom-seeking.

Soul Care and the Tree of Mind

An Ecology of Cognition

A Natural Ecology of the Human Psyche

For the vast majority of human history, psychology was naturalistic: human experience was understood as an aspect of nature, as emergent from nature, and reflective of nature. Only in the modern period (the past 300-400 years, roughly) was psychology redefined as something extraneous to nature, something that needed a whole new vocabulary and theoretical framework to describe. And now, as a result of tens of thousands of studies of "psychology" conducted through this modern perspective, science has reaffirmed what Earth-based cultures have known forever: mind/psychology/cognition is as natural an event as birds flying, rain falling, worms tunneling, and seasons shifting. To understand the human psyche, therefore, we would do well to characterize the phenomena in natural terms.

Here, I'll use the analogy of a tree to help us imagine the three general dimensions of the human psyche: soul (roots), ego (trunk), and spirit (branches).

• Soul represents our connectedness with the larger community of life. It refers to our being rooted in the "soil" of reality: the Earth herself and the countless intersecting ecosystems that constitute the biosphere. Soul, in this sense, is not a spiritual or mystical matter but a tangible and functional matter: our unique place within and service to the larger community and story of life -- our "eco-niche," as the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin defines it.
• Ego refers to our social identities, belongings, and roles. We all move through various spheres of society, including family, culture/subculture, politics, occupation, religious institutions, schooling, sports teams, clubs, etc. Here, "ego" is not a pejorative term, it is a descriptive term: simply the sociocultural dimensions of our being and experience.
• Spirit reflects our nature as manifestations of, and our connections with, the transcendent realms of reality, which has variously been named God, the Divine, cosmic oneness, Brahman, the Great Spirit, Allah, the Tao, etc. This is the transpersonal dimension, the timeless truths of existence independent of any contingent linguistic formulation of those truths.

A robust, mature, and adaptive human psyche requires all these dimensions, just as a healthy tree depends on functioning roots, trunk, and branches. If any one part of a tree is damaged or absent, the whole organism suffers. Indeed, it is rather strange to imagine a rootless tree! What would that even be? It would be a tree statue, if anything, and not a real, living tree. Just so with human existence: a holistically healthy person depends on all three of these dimensions being cultivated simultaneously, as they are all part of the same unified organism: the human/the human psyche.

Importantly, when I say "psyche" here I mean the entirety of human experiencing, not just the "psychological" or "mental" realm, for what we call psychological/cognitive/mental is a set of tangible, literally embodied phenomena. Everything in human existence is a cognitive phenomenon. Said differently, everything that happens to us happens to us holistically and inclusively: there is no sense in which an experience is "purely physical" and not simultaneously "mental." There is no experience that's purely "inner/individual/internal" without some influence of the relational/social. Everything in human life, and life as such, is an ecological matter.

***more coming soon