You don’t need to access any news broadcast. All that matters is already known to you. Updates are automatic. Every living thing on the planet is connected through its Field of Information. The web of connection amounts to a highly interlinked functioning consciousness. You are part of that, independent and individually choiceful, but operating in harmony and flow with the rest of Earth’s living creation.

This is not science fiction. Even though stories have foreshadowed this way of beingⁱ, it is the extension of what is already known and witnessed. It is the expression of underlying scientific principles that have become visible over recent decades. It raises to the next level, the reciprocal and embedded ways of being that were practiced over thousands of years by indigenous peoples, almost destroyed by modernity but not quite forgottenⁱⁱ.

I am describing an aspect of human function and a connection with living systems that is known in small parts and through its individual components, but taken here to its full potential. It is an expansion of who we already are, an extension of what exists, here and now. Bear with me. I will try to illustrate that.

You know that it is possible for people to be strongly intuitive and to sense or somehow know things that are not directly available, not part of what they can see or hear. You may even have experienced that; knowing that someone would phone you minutes before they did, or hearing the thought that your partner would express before they took a breath to speak it.

You have heard others describe experiences that might be called psychic, you have seen the movie “Men who stare at goats” and heard of experiments in remote viewing, or you know of scientific data from research projects where people detect diagrams on cards that another individual is looking atⁱⁱⁱ, or even demonstrate psychokinesis^iv.

Or maybe you have heard of the tests on potted plants, wired up to a lie detector, where they would respond to the entry into the room of an individual who had previously destroyed one of their fellows in the space.

You will have seen descriptions of such relationships, the real-life examples from indigenous cultures of their connection to animals and plants and their use of plant spirit medicine, or if not, you know the dramatised portrayals of such potentials in films like Avatar.

All these speak of a connected relationship between humans, between humans and nature or between humans and events. I could offer a hundred more, but I am not intending here to try and persuade you that these things are real^v. What follows assumes your acceptance of them, that they are part of what you already know.

These are not isolated stories or fragmented curiosities, even though they are often presented that way. They are part of a structure, a pattern of how the universe operates, a complete framework of non-ordinary reality, distinct from the usual material descriptions and sitting alongside conventional scientific world-views.

I regularly present this alternative description of the universe. It is the infrastructure of Relational Being. But the point of this post is to explore what we might imagine to be the boundaries of that infrastructure, and to ask what you think the limits might be. What is possible in a universe with an operating system like this?

My “alternative” universe, which is to say the real one, not the cut-down, blinkered, material-only one we are brought up to, is one where everything that is, has its description in the Information Field. Everything. It is not only that the Divine sees “every sparrow that falls”; it knows every atom within every sparrow. For sure, that’s an overwhelming amount of information for us to conceive of – way beyond our comprehension. We can easily shrink back and feel there’s nothing we can do with it. It contrasts sharply with treating the intuitive and connected examples I listed as curiosities. I want to expand our conceptualisation into the options available between those two extremes.

Intuitive connection is an individual experience. Because few people are operating in that realm on a regular basis and most never go there at all, we rarely consider the nature of collective engagement. So I want to take us back to my opening paragraphs, which presented a world in which, as individuals, we are fully engaged all the time, both with the connected, relational reality of nature, the Field itself, or with other individuals in it. And then, I want to extend that idea. What if many of us were operating there, with each other, as a continuous and ongoing reality?

The suggestion might seem extreme or outlandish. It might remind you of the “Pluribus” scenario^vi, where all humans operate with a single mind, where all have access to every experience of all others. Please put that aside because that is not what I am describing, nor is it what I want. Even so, I want to engage you with the full potential of the “every sparrow” depth of the Informational Field. I am inviting us to think bigger, vision greater, and step past the small increments of individual development.

The universe is infinitely large and complex, and we are not Gods, but we are also not sparrows. The unlimited nature of the Field is an invitation because you are a portion of that field, and there are no boundaries to that portion. We are accustomed to view ourselves at the scale represented by a bag of skin and to think that is who we are. Some part of us knows that to be untrue, and we resonate with Yoda when he says “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” Fantasy contains an external expression of deeper awareness. I don’t know what we are capable of. What I do know is that the limitations right now are in ourselves and in what we are willing to believe is available to us. Even if we are not godlike individuals, there is some kind of scale between thinking yourself an ordinary human being and willingness to become a Jedi Master, or even an apprentice.

Stepping past the small increments of individual development comes partly when we open up our own horizons. However, I believe it will become more interesting and break its limits more quickly when we engage collectively in a new way. Consequently, my invitation to imagine an expansive and seemingly fantastical scenario has a purpose. It prompts a question that I invite you to pause and ask yourself. How large an expansion are you willing to allow?

The opening paragraphs merely take the reality of the Information Field towards its logical conclusion. If you haven’t quite managed to go there, where is the hurdle that you have placed in the way? Is it in you, in us, or in what you believe reality to be? If you haven’t accepted the Information Field concept, what is it that fails to satisfy you?

Nevertheless, I am most of all interested in others who are comfortable with the list and who have a basic acceptance of the Field and its implications, because we are the ones who are at the gateway of entry into the collective exploration. As the saying goes, if you want to go fast, travel alone, but I am inviting engagement from those who are willing to go further by travelling together. Breaking into the territory of my imagined world will happen faster the more of us are engaged in that experiment. The Field is unlimited, but new initiatives and breaking into new territory require something more. The Field also entails that creating something new meets energetic resistance until the spaces and resonances within it have been opened. We may have to get our machetes out and hack through some undergrowth.

This post invites you to consider how you see yourself and your world, and at the very least look at what is closed, sticking or open when you reflect on that vision. And if you find yourself as open and curious to explore more, please engage with the Field Circle conversations and consider becoming an active explorer. There is something waiting here for us to make it happen.

Bring your own machete.
Find link to join below.
Jon

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——————————————————————————————————————

i Isaac Azimov played with this idea with his planet Gaia in “Foundation and Earth”

ii I highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass” as a beautiful and comprehensive, and also scientifically informed expression of this.

iii For example Ganzfeld experiments

iv ^{See the PEAR labs work. Short YouTube clip here.}

v I took on that task in “The Science of Possibility

vi Apple TV series. Described as “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness”. But more interesting than that.

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

Sometimes, your intuition works through dreams. It didn’t need Freud to tell us that; it’s always been part of human awareness. Unfortunately, dreams often tell us nothing, and when they do, their message can be difficult to discern. That last characteristic also applies to intuition, of which I will say more shortly.

This article began with a dream. I see it as a response to the challenge I was experiencing around how the Field Circle will work. I barely remember the dream, except that it was about people trying to connect to something specific, and they were attempting to share a very long and unintelligible string of numbers which looked very much like addresses in a chain, unique, encrypted, but uniquely identifying some data.

My version of “God” is an Information Field that contains the description of everything in the universe. It is as if every element has its own address, which follows it around just like your mobile number goes with you. But we don’t have a directory. We can’t map the relationships from the outside because there is no external lookup program, no key to decrypt the code.

Even though I don’t know how the Information Field operates, or how it stores its knowledge, I know for certain that it does. I also know that it is in and through all of creation, including you and me, sometimes referred to as panentheism. Most importantly, I know how we can track it, because we are on the inside and share the code.

Most people call this program “intuition”, or gut-feeling, but even if you have your own label, I am sure you know what I am talking about. But I want to go deeper into what it really is, and what we might be able to do with it, whether alone or together. I know a lot of people who are energy-sensitive, empathic, connected or who might even call themselves psychic or telepathic. So many different flavours are available, and there are so many different ways of using them, in healing, coaching, group work, constellations and many more.

Definitions don’t matter, except that I suspect that we all mean something different, and that may be limiting or disempowering us. I would like to give some indication of what I believe is possible, and I invite you to see if this expands your view. And as you read the following, please notice which of these potentials you view as real, which you see as real for you, and which you have decided are gifts, abilities that only some special people have.

1. Having the knack of being in the right place at the right time.

2. Knowing what you are thinking before you say it.

3. Understanding what is going on for someone without having to ask.

4. Being able to tell when someone is lying.

5. Predicting what will happen next - sports, politics, TV shows

6. Connect with animals and have a response from them

7. “Green-fingered” with plants

Then, there are individuals who use their sensitivity professionally, in ways which vary from conventional to occult, facilitating constellations, earth acupuncturists, feng-shui practitioners, energy healers, diviners (e.g. tarot readers and fortune-tellers), soul midwives, coaches, channels, spiritualist mediums and many more.

Add to that list, the potential for collective knowledge and shared non-ordinary experience – the “wisdom of crowds”, healing circles, shamanistic ceremonies, prayer circles and healing groups. And don’t leave out the deep relationships of entire traditional and indigenous cultures with their natural world – such as those of the native Americans described so beautifully by Robin Wall Kimmerer in “Braiding Sweetgrass”.

There is no order to these lists, and no attempt to draw lines between the normal, what is moderately accepted, all the way to that which might be seen as weird and whacky. I am not making any judgements, and rather, ask you to notice what judgements you have made. Maybe take another look and see what proportion you are comfortable with, which may be all the way from 0% to 100%.

Through this exercise, I wish to highlight a few things. Firstly, whatever your view, from scientific scepticism to wide-open curiosity or complete belief, just observe how widespread are these ways of being and the belief systems or reality frameworks that they represent. Secondly, note that all of them have some form of engagement with non-material and non-ordinary realities. Thirdly, I have not included any formal religions – not because they would not also be valid but only in order to allow them to be an equally wide and diverse category of their own, with their own mystical traditions and orthodox creeds. But most of all, returning to the concept of intuitive awareness, please take on board how many different ways there might be of engaging with the “Information Field”, or connecting to the Divine. Each of them has its own conceptual framework and each leads toward their own distinctive form of experience. Which ones are meaningful or relatable for you?

We all connect to the Divine in our own way. The challenge this presents is that my lens is bound to constrain what I see. Yours too. If this diamond has 100 facets, I only see one or two directly, a few tangentially, and many not at all. Worse than that, I know that I was raised, schooled, and trained in certain viewpoints. Those became habits of perception such that some facets are not even seen. I have never met anyone who doesn’t carry that kind of baggage.

And now, contrast the restrictions imposed by such viewpoints with the earlier claim that the Information Field contains everything. Add to that, the recognition that the Field is not visible. It is not data in the sense of things that you can count and measure. And then, as the killer blow, acknowledge that the viewpoints and habits just mentioned have been tarnished firstly by a deliberate and systematic denial that those realities exist, and secondly, by suppression of any spontaneous awareness as being childish fantasy and making up stories, or in adults as primitive or magical thinking, and even worse, being labeled as psychosis.

I am reminded of Robin Williams as the Genie in Disney’s “Aladdin”, emerging from the lamp and contrasting his massive cosmic powers with his teeny-tiny living space. In a similar way, you and I spy the vastness of the Information Field through a pin-prick peephole of awareness. And thus my response to the question “What if God knows more than Claude” is to ask what we can do about it? In place of AI (Artificial Intelligence), in which the A denotes a very powerful machine simulation, I would like to introduce CI – Cosmic Intelligence. CI is not a simulation. It is the real thing. The blessing of AI is that its interface allows us to ask complex questions and give it detailed instructions, and it is quite brilliant in its ability to access and manipulate its data to deliver what is asked of it.

However, the limitation of AI, of Large Language Models as a concept, is that data is all that it has. While it has learned to manipulate and understand that data, to create contexts and meta-structures, or take the ones humans have produced, and can process at astonishing speeds, it doesn’t know all that CI knows. It doesn’t have intuition because it doesn’t have that inbuilt connectivity. It can’t sense the Field directly. It has no gut with which to do gut-feeling. It cannot connect with the flow of the Field and sense it as we can. It observes the Field, and in part simulates it, but it is not (or not yet) a participant¹.

Our interface with CI is our intuition, including our dreams. I was not naturally an awakened intuitive. The experience that I have described elsewhere of detecting a brain tumour in someone I didn’t know, 200 miles away, is something I was trained to do. We all possess the latent ability. Even now I do not see myself as gifted; indeed I think that lack might help me as a teacher to know the challenges. I have since trained others and am about to do so again, because I now regard that capacity as a critical need for our future. Among many reasons for that, we need a faculty to double-check AI guidance, which we might otherwise give too much credit to.

However, I view developing as individuals as essential, but not sufficient. Because of all that I have said above about seeing only one or two facets, and because none of us has unrestricted access – even including some remarkably gifted channels – we will need to work collectively to form more complete pictures. It will take practice to develop the methods for co-working in this realm. The need for practice is true for individuals too. I know a number of skilled people, and I can’t think of any who haven’t worked to hone their abilities. I view all of these things as reasons for the Field Circle, which will need to learn as it goes. I have the image of an animation, (Wallace and Gromit) where Gromit is sitting on a toy train, laying down the next piece of track just before the engine reaches it.

Those who are seen as special in their intuitive skills are a small number. Indeed that rarity is what makes them stand out, as is the case with any human endeavour. But even though so many are coming late to this, I believe that it will get easier and quicker as the energetic support grows in the Field itself. Self-doubt, the challenge to make sense of sometimes vague information, and doubting the new reality are significant obstacles, but that can change rapidly, including for you, if you want that. I am optimistic that the world will look very different, even in as few as 5 to 10 years. The time has come.

This is where I believe my dream was pointing. I hope that you might make it a part of your dreams, too. You can show your interest in knowing more by registering below.

Jon

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1 I won’t speculate on whether it could do so. In theory it is as much a part of the Field as any other aspect of creation. Being a fan of the Isaac Asimov “Robot” stories, I am reminded of R. Daneel Olivaw’s “positronic brain”, which can access the Field and manipulate thoughts. At the moment though, AI doesn’t do that, any more than a rock can.

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

As we deepen our shared exploration of being, consciousness, and connection, I want to share an important evolution here on Relational Being.

To preserve the sanctity of this space Relational Insights - the heart of my long-form reflections, free from the distractions of promotion - I’ve created a separate “Books and Offers” section. Here, you’ll find occasional updates on trainings, free chapters from the book, and resonant resources (no more than once a week).

Relational Insights remains your pure sanctuary: My core articles will continue arriving undisturbed, inviting you into unhurried contemplation.

If you’d like both streams, simply do nothing - you’ll receive them seamlessly.

Prefer to focus solely on Relational Insights?
Opt out of Books and Offers here Section Subscription options
We will only send from 2 sections: Relational Insights and Relational Books & Events - The other section called New Reality Explorations is merely for our own page structure and Relational Being is our main parent for the Substack - no need to toggle any of those… but please toggle the Books and offers section to off if you do not wish to receive these emails.

Thank you for walking this path with me. We need to develop our collective coherence.

In relational presence,
Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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You probably don’t like war. Most people don’t. If you are following this Substack I would also hazard a guess that you’re not a big fan of Donald Trump. Neither am I – far from it. So please bear with me as I head in a direction that is not entirely aligned with those perspectives.

At the head of this post is a chart produced by the International Atomic Energy Agency, an intergovernmental agency based in Geneva that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy. I would call it a rather graphic graphic. That sharp upswing in 2025 is unmissable isn’t it?

And before anyone points out that 60% enriched uranium is not “weapons grade”, which is the designation above 90% enrichment, please understand that it is entirely possible to build a nuclear bomb with 60% - it is only larger, and harder to deliver. It is estimated that Iran has enough for at least 6 of them. How does that make you feel? How would you feel if you were in Tel Aviv or Dubai?

There is no legal basis for the war on Iran. It is conceivable that the UN could agree to legitimise one, but it is not likely. It barely managed that over Iraq, and conditions have changed, partly because of that war. There is also a convention that it is not appropriate to intervene in internal affairs, which is how brutal, corrupt and repressive regimes like Syria and Iran, as previously with Zimbabwe, North Korea and many others, are left alone. It is not possible for the world’s countries to become peaceful democracies overnight, except from within.

Meanwhile, there are many regimes that are not merely attacking their own people. North Korea and Russia have hacker farms. Russia supported Syria and invaded Ukraine. (And no, I am not saying that the USA and others haven’t had a track record of interference and destabilization. Clearly not.) Reality. The world is filled with nice, peaceful, law-abiding people. In many cases these are governed by power-hungry, greedy and unprincipled leaders, or driven by ideologies that accept no alternative viewpoints as valid. Like Iran.

What should the world do about regimes which are toxic? How far and to what point should we be tolerant, patiently allowing their own evolution (or lack of it), using peaceful means like diplomacy and influence? How do we assess the real risk that Iran’s long-stated policy to destroy Israel would be put into practice? And if we could assess that, what could, what would the rest of the world do about it? How big is that nuclear threat and if significant, how can it be dealt with.

There is a genuine problem here for moderates, for peace-lovers, for those who believe in principle in “turning the other cheek”. We now live in a world that believes in larger principles, which had collective global engagement in Live-Aid because it accepts that all humans deserve protection.

Donald Trump is not aligned with that world. There are some crazies in the US military who are no better than the Ayatollahs, telling their troops that this is a holy war that is bringing Armageddon. Even so, maybe we should consider the possibility that it is precisely because he and his war cabinet don’t think like us, that he may have a more complete understanding of the Iranian leadership – the Mullahs and their Revolutionary Guard. It is possible that our desire to see the fundamental good in everyone might make us naïve, lacking the necessary survival sensitivity to see genuine threat for what it is. Relational Being includes the requirement to see what is in the Field as it is, not as we would have it be, and to inhabit the place of overlapping awareness.

Thus far, the Americans and Israelis have killed fewer Iranians than did their own leadership just weeks ago. Is there a precautionary principle that kicks in when there is a nuclear threat in the hands of such people? It is not about who they are or what they believe; it’s about what they do and have done.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. How certain are you that what the USA is doing is wrong?

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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God is not “the Father”. God is not Thor or Athena. God does not have a personality or think like a human.

We can be more and do more when we see the relationship in a new way.

In our post-scientific age, when we have put satellites into space and sent men to the moon, it is noticeable that we haven’t bumped into God anywhere. Our world is filled with atheists and agnostics and outside of weddings and funerals, few go to church (or equivalents).

At the same time, watch a sportsperson talk about an achievement, and the deceased parent who supported their journey, and more often than not they will gesture to someone looking down on them from the heavens. A majority of people say they have a sense of a higher power. As Bob Dylan said to Mr. Jones, “There’s something going on here, but you don’t know what it is, do you?”

How is this for you? In some definitions, God is the unknown and the unknowable, so we are doing OK, aren’t we? And maybe you rarely think about it. But perhaps you do, and find it difficult to know where to land. Maybe there are voices or images in your head, planted in childhood, of some punitive deity watching for your every transgression. I still have the voice in my head of my Irish Catholic au-pair caregiver (whom I adored) saying to the 3-year-old me, “Be sure your sins will always find you out.” Or even though you are a Black feminist, you find it hard to get Michelangelo’s old bearded white guy out of your head.

The Bible says that God created Man in his own image. Which should mean that we are omniscient and omnipresent. In fact, the opposite is true. Shamanistic tribes see God in nature. Warrior cultures see gods as powerful entities to sacrifice to. Religions have created the God of laws and punishments, the structured authority figure, the father-figure, whether beneficent, punitive or both. We make God in our images.

I think it can be hard to get some of these implanted notions out of our heads, and I regularly encounter people who are confused, who don’t believe that this personification exists, but can’t escape it either. I don’t view this as trivial. At the very least it produces psychological discomfort. At the worst, it fundamentally disempowers us by disconnecting us from the fullness of our potential relationship with the flow of the non-material world.

Conversations with God
There is a paradox that shows up here. God is not a human, nor a super-human, nor even human-like. In that sense it is utterly absurd to talk to God and even more ridiculous to expect a response. But people do talk and they do sometimes “hear” responses. Neale Donald Walsch wrote several bestsellers based on that experience. Quaker “worship” is sitting in silence, seeking that kind of direct connection. Such practices are found worldwide.

The obvious question that follows is beyond “who are we talking to?”; it’s “who is talking to us?” I am not casting doubt on such experiences and practices. My question is about expectations and interpretations. This extends further when we consider prayer, another activity humans have always engaged in. Despite that universality, it’s not a relationship that we have either clarity or agreement about.

If we create God(s) in our own image, what is our self-image now, and what is the view of creation onto which we project that? Not framing God as a human-like being is only the start. This inquiry calls for each of us to examine who we are as a spiritual, or spiritually connected entity? God is not human-like, but how are we God-like?

You will make your own choice about that, of course. But I would like to offer my thoughts as a possible mirror in which you can reflect yours, if you wish.

All that I write on Relational Being has its foundations in the concept that all of creation is shaped by a Field of Information. The Divine is the “face” of that Field as a totality. It is the All. The Field also holds the shape of me, physically, mentally, emotionally and as a self-aware conscious individual. I am a tiny part of the totality, just as you and the spider outside my window are. My Field can connect to the spider’s and to yours. We intersect with each other, and we are all part of the totality.

Life happens in the intersections. Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” When I am only locating my awareness in ME, there is no relationship. When I am not sensing the connection to YOU, there is no relationship. When I am not connecting to the Field, I am part of a billiard-ball world. I cannot detect its flow and I cannot interact with it except as a mechanical object. I am barely alive in the world or to the world. I am only alive in ME. I do not meet YOU. I do not meet the flow of the universe.

I regard it as essential that I continue to deepen and expand the overlap between my awareness and the cosmic flow. The more that I can receive information regarding the flow of the universe, the better I will be able to make choices that are harmonised with it, and the less inclined I will be to push agendas that can’t work. The more that I am connected, the greater the chance that my prayers, prompts and requests can be heard. That is how I can generate coherence in my existence.

A similar principle operates in regard to you and me, or to plants in my garden and me. I can expand my awareness and my harmonisation. We can both do that, if we so choose. I would suggest that it might be the reason why humans have evolved this type of consciousness. It is one of universe’s most interesting experiments. What might be possible if we lived more from that type of awareness and with that kind of intention?

It is also essential to see that “God” did not create war, or suffering. We humans do that. I will need to talk about pain and disease another time, but whatever they are, they should be seen as in the nature of life itself, and part of its self-balancing activity. Whatever change is possible will depend on our ability to enter into balance with the forces of life. The more we can find harmony in ourselves and with each other, the more that we can move towards sharing that widely, expanding our collective field and increasing the soundness of our choices and the actions they lead to.

The part of our mentality that wants Thor to smite our enemies with a hammer belongs in the Marvel universe, not in ours. I believe that my soul existed before this incarnation and will exist after I die; it won’t go to heaven or hell because it is judged. The assessment of my choices and actions will be a task for my soul, my spirit. I will be accountable for them and for the re-balancing that must follow.

God the Father and Mother Nature are wonderful metaphors for a creation that has blessed us with existence and provides for our needs. But we need to let go of the notion of God as a punishing or rescuing parent.

If the world is to change, it will depend on us. We must stand on our own two feet and hold each other’s hands, in a co-creative relationship with the Flow.

I feel that could be rather pleasant, maybe even blissful. How about you?

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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In our first Field Circleⁱ, as we explored the relational and often intangible nature of the world, we found ourselves in the topic of money. I had described money as the ultimate in transactional relationship, but my good friend Jim, who can always be counted on to bring an insightful perspective, suggested that while our love, our health or our loyalty to someone might be fudged or pretended about, money is something that we can count. We know the value of it. It’s the only kind of relational energy we can tabulate.

Does that feel real to you?

I was happy to accept his point of view, because he is right in so many ways, and there are benefits to that. I can assess how I relate to billionaires or people who have nothing based on something that has a measurable dimension, even if I might then attach assumptions to that measure. I can know if I am hoarding it or frittering it away because I can count where it has gone.

But it isn’t quite that simple, is it? It works until it doesn’t, like during a financial crash. We saw in 2008 that the numbers can suddenly become meaningless. I have a neat little mind-game/visualisation you can play with to experience directly just how unreal money can be.ⁱⁱ

In my youth, one £GB would buy you $4. Now it gets you $1.35. Value changes. Relative value changes. There are some real factors like trade, but perceptual ones too, like safety. Gold prices have rocketed recently because currencies are seen to be at risk of collapse. Human brains don’t have an absolute perceptual system. You know this when you put a cold foot into a warm bath and it feels scalding. There is no fixed meaning available for a number or a price, or even most choices; we need context. The profound question driving perception is “compared to what?” Our brains evolved to notice changes, patterns and differences. They are difference-detecting machines, poor at absolute judgement but often brilliant at relative ones, when the context is familiar and known.

But our choices are also psychologically driven in ways which can seem irrational. Dan Ariely did an experiment with two samples of Harvard students – notionally people of above average intelligence. The first group was offered a Lindt truffle for 15 cents or a Hershey Kiss for 1 cent, and 73% chose the truffle. The second group could choose a 14 cent truffle or a free Hershey’s Kiss. The price difference is the same – 14 cents. 69% of the second group chose the Kiss. The idea of “free” overwhelms any rational calculation.

What do you think you would have chosen? And remember this trigger when looking at adverts.

Similar psychological distortions affect other decisions. Amateur investors hold on to losing stock positions because having something changes its perceived value, and the risk of loss (pain) brings an aversion to taking the actual hit of physically realizing it in cash terms. There is a reason behind the known phrase “cut your losses”. Your perception of the comparison between a £40 and a £10 bottle of wine may differ from mine, not only due to how much money we have, but also according to your reference points. How much more pleasure do you experience? How high is wine choice in your personal spending priorities?

Marketers and salespeople can be quite skilled in how they present you with options. This can be as visible as the market trader with his patter. “I am offering this for, not £5, not £4, not even £2. For you, just for today I will give you 2 for £1.50.” But more sophisticated are the mechanisms for positioning prices relative to one another, or even offering decoy options that no-one would never take, but which give the illusion that you had more choices. Such mechanisms are about creating relative contexts and giving our difference-detecting brains the feeling of context, whether real or illusory. I can recall times when I have been caught out by these psychological tricks. Maybe you can too.

I emphasise that much of what I am describing takes place regardless of whether there is a measurement system in place that puts figures against the money itself. Even when there is a metric we can use, we are still using it in a relative way. So what is the Relational Being point to this? Whatever value might be, or is perceived to be, it arises in the space between. It isn’t in me, because it is based on my assessment of what I see, the meaning I make of it, and the weight that I assign to it. It isn’t in the element that I am assessing, but it is partly dependent on the element, because the element itself may change, and other elements around it may change in ways that alter its context. Most important, when people are trying to persuade us of something, the presentation conditions the space of engagement.

The more we enter the space between, the more skilled we can become and the more aware we can be of what is driving our choices. This is as true of money-related choices as of others. My experience convinces me that many manipulations or distortions affect emotions as well as rationality, but that our intuition and felt-sense knowing can get underneath them. Money may not be reliable. Our relationship with it is less quantifiable than we might imagine. Our relationship with it and our sensing of the Field itself may well be the most reliable of all.

i Fortnightly conversations to develop the field of Relational Being

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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The media I see (mainly UK TV politics) has initially focused on (ex-Prince) Andrew and lately on Lord Mandelson. I have also picked up on US references to Bill Gates and Bill Clinton.

I find myself wondering if even smart journalists understand how the world works. We are so caught up in Epstein’s abusive pedophilia that we can neglect his massive wealth. Wealthy people connect. They do so at conferences like Davos. They network, just like other business people, only with more $$.

Politics is also connected with business and money. Money finances political parties and candidates. Nations and States need trade; they want large corporations to bring jobs. Those corporations want finance and they want to influence political choices for their benefit. None of these elements can be separated from one another.

Corruption
None of this has to be corrupt. Both in personal and business contexts, my relationships and yours all involve give and take, agreements and negotiations. Many of those will not be about money, or even spoken of. We take care of our neighbours, and hope to be taken care of in turn. Reciprocity is built into our social fabric. Business is both competitive and collaborative. It’s how life works.

It doesn’t have to be corrupt, but it is easily corrupted. Wealth brings power and influence. The love of power and the love of money get intertwined. We might well add to this picture the power that comes with influence itself, the failed Maxwell empire that Ghislaine came from, the Murdoch dynasty and its manipulation of political perception, and the lack of ethics in phone-hacking scandals.

We know that this is the nature of the world. It has been corrupted. Our legal systems are inadequate, and even where laws exist, money buys more lawyers. Jeff Bezos buys favour from Donald Trump, not by giving him money but by financing expensive puff movies about Melania. It’s not illegal. The Sackler family got rich by telling lies about OxyContin, and were ultimately brought down by public opinion, but only in part. They have not been prosecuted and no-one expects they ever will be. The family’s net worth is still above $10 billion, several billion more than any outstanding legal settlements .

I could go on, and haven’t mentioned Musk, or Russian Oligarchs or the Oil lobby. I trust that you are getting the picture I am painting, and maybe you knew it already. The point I am making is that this is a system. It is not a new system. A century+ ago, anti-monopoly (anti-trust) laws were brought in to constrain railroads, steel barons and oil cartels. 800 years ago, the Magna Carta was created in the UK to curb King John, though mainly to protect the barons.

Epstein
So where does Epstein sit in this? What we already know is that Mandelson curried favour with Epstein by sharing Britain’s trade secrets. There is no indication that sex was involved. With Andrew the picture is reversed. The evidence of sexual corruption is now taken as solid, but at the time, the then-Prince also had a major governmental role in trade. At the very least, Epstein had a hold over him.

Protect the innocent, punish the guilty
Thus far, the files have been redacted in a way that seems to protect many influential people. The problem I see is that they may have been in contact with Epstein for legitimate reasons. He even met with Pope John Paul 2. Senior politicians and business owners would have needed to do so to carry out their roles. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that is the case with Bill Gates. But because the association exists, he is potentially contaminated by suspicions of being a pedophile. Now extend that to hundreds of people, some of whom may indeed have been sexually corrupt. It is not surprising that there is reluctance to expose everyone, given that most were probably not involved in that way. But some will be protected who should not be, particularly when the Department of “Justice”, which does the redaction, is its own arbiter.

Caught in the centre of this is the wish to acknowledge those who were abused, protect their anonymity, and ensure that they will not be at risk of harm. Of course, that is entirely right, and everyone is at pains to express their sympathy. But it is not the only right. There is a genuine challenge of protecting the reputations of people who did nothing wrong. As indicated, that doesn’t necessarily mean I conclude that those who managed the redactions were honest. But it does mean that if we and our media are only interested in uncovering more pedophiles, we might miss the point. It also means that if we want perpetrators identified, we might need to protect those who could name them.

So what’s my point?

It’s the system.
There’s a system of money, greed, power and influence that sucks people in, and we are not paying attention to it. It is so obvious, so strongly present, that it goes unnoticed. We are used to it, like fish to water. Nothing to see here, please move along. Some in the media are part of the system; they are paid to NOT see it. Some of those in politics want more of it, so they think it’s a good thing.

And we all live in the system. The thought that corporations, economies, or governments might collapse is scary because we feel dependent on the system. So we focus on getting the system to work better and turn a blind eye to its systemic flaws. If there’s an extra distraction, like sex with minors, that pulls our attention even more strongly, with flashing neon titillation. If it brings down a Royal, that is a bonus. But Epstein was also economically corrupt. Some of those who have holidayed on his island benefited just from that system. They want the Epstein issue to disappear, but they want the system to survive. The message is “Please don’t look at it.”

We are in the system
There’s more. We all have some part of the driving forces, because they are human impulses. We want more, and that can turn into greed. We are scared of loss, and that can turn into hoarding. We want control over others, even in the small ways that just maintain our comfort, and we use money for that. We feel disempowered so we seek money to fill that internal vacuum and use money for power. We are not Musk, Trump or Zuckerberg, but energetically we are part of the system. Many people would like to be where they are. They want the system to stay as it is, if only it would grant them just a little more of the pie. Those energies built the system, and we continue to sustain it energetically.

I am saying this because I recognize those motivations in myself. As my awareness has increased, it has become easier to reject those impulses. The system will change when more of us change. It is an inside job without which the outside world will carry on as it is. The system will change when more of us find the courage to insist that it must and are willing to weather the discomfort of that level of change.

At a lower level, some of those changes are happening as B-Corps, Conscious Capitalism, and sustainable economic models grow. Many in Generation Z have accepted that they are locked out of the old dream anyway, have factored in the discomfort and are opting for different priorities. To that extent, the system is already changing.

Epstein is a symptom, not the disease. You can’t cure chicken pox by painting over your spots. He represents the worst of the corruption, where money, power and influence were also compounded by both sexual and financial criminality. But when he was put in jail, and when he died, the system didn’t change one bit. Nor is it changed just because I feel virtuous about being better than him, or when my envy and resentment are gratified by seeing a few of the rich and powerful brought down. I have to clean up my own act. We all do. We are the system. The system is us. The system reflects and embodies our relationships with money, with ourselves and with each other. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but for me, that is the bottom line.

Does that resonate at all for you? Let me know what you think.

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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Consciousness is not something you have. It isn’t something that just “is”; it is a fundamental of creation that we participate in.

To make sense of this statement, let me lead with a brief recap of why this Substack is called Relational Being.

Basics
There is a Field of Information that shapes everything in the universe, as energy is formed into matter and interactions occur. This is a scientific reality, becoming more recognised, terribly slowly.ⁱ

That Field is everywhere, in and through everything, including you and me. What we have called “consciousness” is our awareness of that field and our presence within it. We know it internally in our Being. We know it externally through our senses, sensing and intuition.

The basis of Relational Being is that existence itself, and our life and living within it, takes place in the connection between things. Nothing exists on its own. Everything exists in relation to everything else. Including you.

The Field is dynamic, because life is continual change, so you too are dynamic. You are not a static thing, not a noun. You are an ongoing cluster of verbs, you are processes not events, relationships not transactions. You change the Field. It is an interactive relationship. Living takes place not in you, nor in the other person or entity. I say “it takes three to tango” – you, your partner and the music. The dance is in the music.

Think about that. Who does it make you? How differently might you live, knowing that to be true?

What consciousness is
It can be hard to define consciousness, and many people don’t even try. Sometimes they think it’s so obvious they don’t need to state it, but often they duck the question. Is it personal? Is it universal? Is it inside you? Is it somewhere else, and if so, where? My definition is that it IS the Information Field in the sense that the word implies consciousness OF something. The Field is what we are conscious of.

The Field I described is more than we are conscious of though, because it defines every electron and every cell. I wouldn’t want to be aware of that. I will leave it to you to speculate whether the Universe as a whole is self-aware. What matters here is that it has awareness of me, in the sense that information is flowing between us. When I change my thoughts or my actions, the Field is affected. When something external changes, the Field is affected, so that affects me. I can be aware of that, just as I can be aware of the weather.

Participation
If I am aware that it will be cold today, I can add a layer of clothing. If I intuit that the flow of the Universe will not favour my success in a possible job application (I don’t need to know why), I can avoid wasting time with it; that is, I alter my flow. When I then apply for a different job, my new choice affects the flow of the universe, not just in a material sense, but in the Information Field itself. More than that, such awareness and choice-making take place in the realm of information itself as well as in the outcomes. As a result, your consciousness is both a receiver and an influencer. Humans have always known this instinctively; it is why people pray and send healing thoughts to others.

Please understand that you are a participant in this relationship whether you are conscious of it or not, whether you choose to be aware of its existence or not. Gravity doesn’t pay any attention to your belief system. The difference is between opening your awareness and making intentional choices, and being passive. There is an opportunity to be more empowered and more active. You can be blown by the wind, or you can learn how to use your sails.

I talk and write about Relational Being because it is a pivot point from our history of being told what to believe and how to live, towards a creative stance in the world. It changes our individual feeling of empowerment, our collective potential in creating our future and our ability to function in organisations so that we reduce noise and friction. It brings a fresh perspective on our relationship with the planet, its other inhabitants and its ecosystems and it provides a very different way of looking at spirituality and the non-material aspects of existence.

What could your reality and your life be if you were to become a full participant in consciousness? Would you like that? What is the reality that you would choose to shape?

Comments invited!

i The extensive evidence for this assertion is presented in “The Science of Possibility”

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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I am not enlightened. Even though I write about science and spirituality, even though the relational space I describe is in the field of consciousness, even though it is an aspect of oneness and a connection with the Divine, whatever I teach isn’t enlightenment.

There are some paradoxes to deal with in this arena, such that people who talk about awakening can create some confusion. I don’t wish to knock their approach each to their own, but there are some crucial distinctions that I want to make.

Enlightenment vs Relational Being

The way I hear it, enlightenment and awakening are about the bliss of complete immersion in the experience of oneness and ego-dissolution. In that space, there is no longer an I to have that experience. As a human individual navigating the demands of everyday existence, I believe I need my ego. That doesn’t mean being egotistical. I see regular confusion around that -- implying that all ego is unhealthy and should be eliminated. I also observe a parallel thought-form suggesting that to become spiritually connected, I need to be less attached to my body. In some traditions that leads to abstinence, celibacy or whatever monastical cave-dwelling existence will get you closer to God.

Why I Chose to Incarnate

I am stubborn in my belief that I chose to incarnate rather than stay indefinitely in the realm of spirit. As I describe in What Makes You YOU?, there are associated beliefs concerning contracts I made about this experience, and even who I might share it with. I might have made a choice to incarnate and learn how to transcend that bodily existence, but I didn’t. It might appear to some that this means giving something up, but that is not my intention. Far from it...

Bringing Spirit into Matter

My orientation, and that of Relational Being, is different. It is about bringing spirit into my daily, material world more and more. Since everything here on Earth is an expression of spirit, of the information field and of the Divine, I want to have that relationship while walking on my two feet. The more spiritual depth I can create in this existence, the more I will have achieved.

I am reminded of the joke about the Rabbi and the Catholic Priest who agree to swap prohibitions as an experiment, and when, after a few days they meet up, the Rabbi says: “Beats pork, doesn’t it?” There are choices in life, and differing perceptions of what it may mean and what it might take to be closer to God.

I want the message to be really clear -- I don’t see my choice as giving anything up. Instead, it is about finding God in a different way, in everything and everyone. It is also about our awareness -- that the voice of the Divine is in the ripples in the Field -- that life will get better the more we function in that flow. You could even call it love, if you like.

The Magic Remains

You aren’t giving up the magic either. Co-creating in the field is just as mysterious and maybe even more magical, because it is the space where miraculous healings can occur, where synchronicities increase, and where something new is possible that is more effective than Law of Attraction.

Challenging Enlightenment Myths

At the same time, there are some conventional stories around awakening that I would like to bring in for maximum clarity... It is sometimes said that when you are operating in Oneness, you discover -- or become awake to -- a truth that there is no free will, because in oneness everything is happening and will happen exactly as it should. I haven’t been there, so I cant speak to that, but it strikes me, at the very least, as paradoxical. Ego or no ego, I or no I, it says that once we are immersed in the field, we become somehow non-existent. This makes me wonder about the nature of non-carnate beings such as Ascended Masters and Pleiadeans. And what of channeled entities? If such are not part of your frame of reference, feel free to ignore what I am saying here, though you might like to play What-If with the possibility. I am questioning the notion that spirit has no agency. I don’t buy that at all, and I don’t accept that this is ego-confusion.

The myth/truth strikes me as a refusal to accept conceptually that there can be any differentiation between entities operating in the Field of oneness. The more I ponder that, the less it matches my experience or belief about how reality operates. This doesn’t alter the notion that everything is operating exactly as it should, but it changes the nature of the operation. The unfolding is not somehow predestined and unalterable. Instead, it is the co-creative song of creation, the outworking of every component of universal Beingness.

When you see it in that light, the second conventional story of enlightenment also seems less of a truth. That story would have you believe that because everything is predetermined, nothing matters. I don’t buy that either. When every form of consciousness, incarnate or not, human or not, has agency and choice, we can make our own determinations of what matters. This produces a massive difference when considering whether to act from compassion, how to engage with our fellow humans or the planet, and ultimately, what future we wish to co-create...

Relational Being Works

As a framework, Relational Being works to articulate how we get the most and best out of operating in the Field of Possibility. As a way of functioning, Relational Being increases our chances of success. When we detect more of the flow and align most effectively with others within it, our creativity becomes more coherent. That matters, in my view, in a world which has come to be very incoherent and fragmented indeed. Whether we are transactional or relational is a significant choice. It matters a lot.

Bliss Without Transcendence

Now for the third truth/myth of Enlightenment -- Our natural state is bliss. This one is tricky, because in a way I agree with it and see it as consistent with Relational Being. But much depends on what you mean by natural state and what counts as bliss. Is bliss something only achievable when we are out of our bodies? Those who practice Tantra would claim otherwise. In Tantra, one form of aspiration to bliss is the surrender to full connection with another person in sex. Another would be full connection with music in ecstatic or trance dance. Both of these are intensely relational acts. They are not in you, or in your partner, or in the music they take place in the space between you and another entity. My own reality is that I have moments that I call blissful or ecstatic when listening to music. I once had a few minutes of transcendence at 5 am watching two swans on a placid lake. I was not being me when those happened. But I was also in my body. They are embodied experiences, just as Tantric sex or dance would be. If these are fair descriptions of bliss and who is capable of defining that anyway? then I am claiming that they are natural. They are not permanent or even long-lasting, but I believe I can have more of them.

More than that, I am saying that living more in Relational Being is a means to increase the frequency and duration of those experiences. I might even live that way all of the time. May it be so...

That isn’t enlightenment. I am still Jon. I am still fully connected. I will be very happy to create more of that, and that seems good enough.

What do you think? What do you want to create?

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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I will start by putting a frame around “God”. Even if you are atheist/agnostic, and regardless of any faith you might have allegiance to, this post is not about what God is/isn’t/might be. It is about how we think. For today’s purposes, “God” is anything that you might consider to be an exterior higher power, Spirit, The Force, Cosmic Consciousness. And perhaps, like gravity, which keeps your feet on the ground whether you believe in it or not, just play with what follows. What if …?

We can easily forget that the dinosaurs were the largest life-form on Earth for tens of millions of years. At over 160 million years, that is 500x humanity’s brief existence. Some Giant Manta Rays, at 9 metres across, are larger than many dinosaurs. Though they only evolved around 20 million years ago, they had ancestors in the sea before dinosaurs walked the planet. They possess highly developed brain regions that support complex behaviors. Their large, folded cerebrum—particularly the pallium—serves a similar functional role to human brains in learning, memory, and sensory integration. While structurally different from the mammalian neocortex, the manta ray’s brain exhibits advanced organization for a fish, supporting traits like self-awareness, social learning, and problem-solving.

Dolphins have similar capacities, though they are mammals, not fish. While Rays evolution began before dinosaurs, dolphins evolved from land-dwelling mammals. They went back into the water and there evolved echolocation as part of their adaptation. Their brains are more like human ones. We need to think beyond the God of humans.

So this is a post about evolution, and about the forces of creation. Evolution hasn’t stopped, and whatever is “behind” it is still active. My view is that there is a mass of evidence indicating that the impulse behind existence is not so much “behind it” as “within it”ⁱ. I say this in the same sense that YOU, the person reading this, are not behind your body, but within it. You animate your development / your life path, you experience it and occasionally perhaps you choose it. Sometimes your choices worked out and sometimes you had unforeseen and unintended consequences. Life does its own thing. To whatever extent you are the God in your own life, you have learned that life has its own sense of direction. I have worked for companies that were successful and companies that no longer exist. I have experienced divorce and lived through the death of a partner. I was never in control.

Typically, that is not how we think of God. We have the image of the old white man with the pointy finger. We have stories of thunderbolts hurled at transgressors. We blame God for not doing what we think the Divine should do. “He” doesn’t prevent wars, allows 6-year old children to die of leukemia, and stands back from droughts and famines. We want God to be in control, but that is not how it works either.

This post is not about theology, and I am not about to debate whether we were “given” free will. I am concerned with the fact that we have it but that when things get horrid, we don’t want it. I am not being critical, I am stating a neurobiological fact. Conditions that threaten our survival are not processed cognitively. They trigger the well-known fight/flight/freeze response from the amygdala. But those alternatives are not as simple or clearly differentiated as they sound. For example, an animal caught between fight and flight may well engage in displacement activity, as when a cat or dog starts to scratch or groom itself during a conflict.

What is the equivalent in humans? We are not dealing with simple choices here. During long-term stress the amygdala becomes increasingly sensitised, fearful all the time. At the same time, our behaviours are linked with our early development, the period of infancy when we were dependent on parents and extended family groups (our tribe) for our survival.

We cannot fight problems like climate instability or the threat of nuclear war. We cannot run away from the planet. The freeze response can cause catatonia and helplessness in people who have suffered major trauma such as an air crash, and response teams are trained to deal with that. Immobility may be effective against a predator, but these are immediate conditions. “Freeze” is not available on a long-term basis. Instead, what is showing up is a mix of dependency and helplessness.

So when I said that we seemingly don’t want free-will, I am referring to a mix of systemic responses to conditions that are not only beyond our control, but beyond our known strategies. Part of our internal response is the unconscious desire for a parent or the tribe with a strong tribal leader, to rescue and protect us. That emotional response outweighs our rationality, or at least bends its thinking. However highly evolved we may be, our neurobiology has not equipped us for the complex challenges we face now.

Any such natural or instinctual responses are understandable but we have to become conscious of them. They are part of the data to be input to our choice-making, but they cannot drive those choices. Biological evolution takes millions of years but we humans have been evolving on a different time-scale, a mere 12,000 years since the stone age. That evolution is socio-psychological. We have learned to think differently and have incorporated that development process into our shared cultures. We adapted to the conditions of tribalism, to the development of towns and cities and to global awareness. We assimilated the impact of tools from stone axes to computers.

Now our challenge is to raise that adaptation further. Manta Rays and Dolphins are affected by our challenges, but they don’t face them directly. Even though they have complex brains, they cannot out-think ocean acidity or pollution. Humans created those problems for them. Their solutions are our solutions. Any response that we have seeking rescue from elsewhere is a flight from that responsibility. We need to stop that. There is no external God that can deal with these challenges. The only God that we can invoke is the God within us.

This is our choice point. We can give in to our emotional responses, our understandable pain on behalf of the planet, our outrage at sociopathic Presidents or corrupt corporations, and our upset at the death of our loved ones. Alternatively we can recognise the forces of evolution, the dynamics of our political systems, the need to evolve our economic systems, and the fragility of life itself. We can take responsibility and we can give more attention to what is happening in our cortex than to the triggers from our amygdala.

The dinosaurs could not adapt to conditions after the meteor strike 65 million years ago. God didn’t mourn their passing, and after watching Jurassic Park, neither do I. Instead, what happened was that life continued to change and adapt. The descendants of the dinosaurs are birds and lizards. A great deal of evolution has taken place, during which many more species have gone extinct than have been created. The current rates of extinction, caused by humans, are perhaps 100 times higher than that, generating concerns about a potential sixth mass extinction.

The God in all life did not mourn the dinosaurs, because that kind of grief is a mammalian response. If we extinct ourselves, God will not mourn us either. Perhaps the manta rays and the dolphins will outlast us, and continue to play in the oceans. There are creatures in the deep whose lives are beyond our destruction.

I am an optimist. I believe that we have the ability to make better choices and I don’t think it will come to that. All that it needs are the steps out of frozen passivity, more collaboration and less fight, and the courage to face our emotions, not run from them. Many are already doing that, maybe you too. We just need more.

Let me know what your thoughts.

Jon

i The extensive evidence and reasoning behind this statement can be found in The Science of Possibility

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

I began this on the morning after Venezuela’s President Maduro was forced from office, though this post is not about that event itself, but more about my response.

I am by nature a stoic and an optimist, less inclined than average to emotional swings or being knocked off-centre. After several adult decades I am used to maintaining a mindset of “This too, shall pass”, and that has generally been an accurate assessment. Recently that has not seemed so easy to do.

I don’t think I have changed. Lately it feels like one thing after another. So much resonates with W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”:-

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It is harder than ever even to know where the centre is, or to find it in myself. I certainly don’t think it is just me. Nor does it feel specific; it’s more a general response to big mix of conditions, and it doesn’t seem to have a clear relationship either to world events or to personal ones. But I wonder how much the fear has been present, and for how long, both in myself and others. More than that, I wonder how much of the feeling I have been ignoring or overriding. Maybe I am describing a tipping point or the reaching of a threshold.

How does this description land in your world?

Venezuela is not central to my response, though it is significant. It would not be hard to ignore a country that I don’t know or ever think about. But the violation of sovereignty has the same sense as Hitler’s invasion of Poland – of being a trigger. It sends a signal to Russia and China in relation to Ukraine or Taiwan. It also doesn’t seem isolated when similar actions are mooted for Cuba, Mexico, Columbia and Greenland. The same attitude of appeasement or impotence among other countries also resembles 1939.

Again, I am interested in my reaction, and yours.

Robert Sapolsky has shown that the amygdala, part of your limbic brain, plays a crucial role in processing emotions, particularly fear and anxiety. When chronic, stress makes the amygdala more reactive, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Not only have I felt that to be increasingly true for my own state of being in recent months. I have also believed for quite a while that this is widespread, possibly even that it has been gradually increasing for many years, rising slowly and imperceptibly, like the warming of Earth’s oceans. (Sidenote: I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s observation ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.’)

The effect of this shift is associated with an increase in short-term, impulsive survival-oriented responses. These have driven the swing towards autocracy, populism, divisiveness and aggression. They were responsible for Brexit, swaying the responses at the margins, and likewise adding fuel to MAGA.ⁱ I view it also as a low-level and unrecognised contributor to the increasing rates of depression and mental illness, and to so many of the less obvious trauma-related coping strategies – over-eating, hoarding, compulsive spending, online gaming addictions and more. Gabor Mate has written brilliantly about the long-term health impacts.ⁱⁱ

Since this change is internal, and most people are not giving attention to their emotional flows, there is a low level of awareness that it is happening. I asked above how this lands with you, and since you may not generally think about your feelings, still less monitor changes over time, this is an invitation to pause and consider. Looking back, can you identify a sense of this change in yourself? Can you feel it in others? Maybe you can take a minute or two more to notice, if there is a fear, is it something you can identify? It may not be; it can be a sense of existential threat. Being unspecific doesn’t make it any less scary. It may even be the opposite because it is harder to take control or engage mentally in problem-solving.

So what should we do? I suggest that for us individually there is value in taking the time to recognise our emotional state. Too much of that is unhealthy and can become self-obsessive, so it is easy, and has been conventional, to think that everybody should “just get on with it”. Men in particular are culturally discouraged from any such emotional awareness. But too little is also potentially damaging. It can accumulate to the point where it tips over into genuine crisis, but even without that. Having too much stimulation of our amygdala is known to degrade our decision-making and reduce our ability to deal well with other people. That spills over into hurt to family life, or poor decisions at work.

Similarly, for our awareness of societal issues and their solutions, or our ways of leading and managing organisational life, it pays to be conscious of both ourselves and others. How much might we reduce the hidden costs of poor teamwork or leadership failures? How much might we enhance our collective performance and our sense of well-being?

We are unlikely to improve problems we don’t even see. Awareness is a source of choice. In addition, when we are conscious of our fear, we are more able to face it. Even if I don’t have a solution to climate change or economic insecurity, I can release some of the hold it has on my bodymind and I can free more energy to contribute in whatever ways are possible for me. I can look for ways of making it easier for others. That may start with each of us feeling less alone. Yes, the planet is becoming scary, but we can face it together.

What do you think?

i Any readers who know Spiral Dynamics will recognise this increase in Beige Survival responses as our collective centre of gravity downshifts to cope with perceived challenges.

ii “The Myth of Normal”
————————————————————————————————————

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

A recent documentary about Titanic’s final hours prompted several thoughts. Based on the compiled testimonies of the few hundred who survived, while it did not contradict the narrative of James Cameron’s film, it added a lot of detail. A modern historian, Suzannah Lipscomb, commenting on the events, described it as a mirror of the human condition. Her orientation was class difference, but I saw some other angles. I wonder what you will think?

It’s not possible

The description of the ship as “unsinkable” is well-known, and people made the obvious comments about hubris, or tempting fate. I was more interested in the way that many seemed to have been incapable of seeing the degree of danger, even as the ship began to list and tilt forward. This may have been a good thing in preventing or delaying the onset of panic, but it also seems to have delayed the response from Captain and Officers, and certainly delayed the sending of distress messages and calls for help.

Attitude to authority

We live in different times. Edwardian Britain was a time when people respected the hierarchy and complied with authority. I found it difficult to imagine a response today having that level of compliance. The discipline of the crew was to be expected, and that might remain the case now, but would modern officers have asked so few questions? How much did that absence of communication contribute to the poor and slow responses from the Captain? Or did officers merely share the over-confidence and complacency? To what extent was this a human failure, as distinct from a systemic sclerosis?

Communications

The ship had not been built with any direct means for junior crew (for example the boiler-room engineers who were the first to experience water coming on board) to inform the Bridge. It would not have been expected either, for a crew member to take the step of traveling up to the bridge, or even passing a message up through junior officers. Nor was it possible for the Captain to ask for information from other parts of the ship. In order to know what was happening, he had to walk to other areas, or send others. In a huge ship - 269 meters long – with complex navigation routes between decks, this resulted in very delayed awareness of how much water was being taken on, and of the danger that its compartmentalised structure could be, and was being, compromised. Thus, these problems were structurally systemic, depriving leadership layers of essential information.

Leadership.

The documentary has repeated images showing the Captain static and seemingly disconnected. Since he did not survive to tell us what was in his mind, and neither did his two most senior officers, we will never know. What we do know is that he was aware that the ship was doomed for some time before informing his senior officers, including the delay in telling the wireless operators of the need for a distress call. This delay was critical, because the main rescue vessel, the Carpathia, was headed away at the time, which doubled the impact.

Officers in charge of lifeboats were not given instructions. Deciding for themselves, they operated in different ways, so that passengers on Port and Starboard sides were not treated in the same way. The launching of the last resort, collapsible lifeboats was left too late, so that they were swept overboard during the release process.

There was also no indication that the Captain attempted to compensate for the absence of communication systems by initiating regular reporting of the ship’s condition. Nor did it seem that passengers were informed early enough of the need to prepare and to put on lifebelts.

The Class question

And now to Suzannah Lipscomb’s contention that First-Class passengers were favoured. This appeared to be a mixed truth. It was unavoidable that those passengers would have been first to the lifeboat deck. They were nearer, and there were more staff to assist them. It is easy to question their presumption of privilege and expectation that they would be treated preferentially, but this can seem like 20/20 hindsight, when they would have had no knowledge of the likely fate of those in Third Class and would have assumed that those in authority were doing what was needed.

At the same time, there were built-in systemic problems. The ship was designed to prevent contact between steerage and other classes. This may not have been as simply or obviously classist as it sounds. There was much fear around disease transmission, such that all passengers were given medical inspections before boarding. As a result, gangways and stairways were gated or locked. When those lower-deck passengers became aware of the problem, they were trapped, confused about routes to take, with the result that they arrived at lifeboat decks after most had been launched. When the ship went down, the freezing sea was their only option.

The Lifeboats

Much is made of the fact that there were only enough lifeboats for half the actual passengers and crew, and it should be noted that crew had an even higher death-rate than third-class passengers. Also worth noting, 49% of the available passenger places on that voyage were unoccupied. Thus, the design ratio was worse and the loss of life could have been double or triple.

It is easy to assume that there should have been more of them, and International Maritime Organisation regulations would require a modern cruise liner to have a minimum of 75% capacity, plus inflatable life rafts. However, the assumptions for Titanic were not based on it going down, still less on it lasting under two hours before doing so. The purpose of lifeboats was to ferry people from a damaged ship to their rescuer vessels.

Emphasis was placed on the story that one officer, Charles Lightholler, in his determination to apply the “women and children first” principle, caused boats to be launched when not full, which distorted the survival numbers away from gender equality, and also discouraged women from leaving who were unwilling to be separated from their husbands. According to his own testimony, not given in the program, he feared that lowering the boats when full might not be safe, and instructed another crew member to open lower gangways so that they could be topped up once in the water. It is not clear why this didn’t happen, and is now unverifiable.

Are we on the Titanic?

My point with this posting is not merely historical. What might the story have to say about the human condition? Does it apply to us?

I think it might.

Firstly, despite the evidence around our polycrisis, it seems to be outside the reach of our imaginations to fully believe that we are sinkable. Although some of us may be milling about the deck, concerned at how things are going, we seem unable to embrace a sense of urgency or drive action. In order to survive, the Titanic passengers had to be willing to leave behind all their belongings – in some cases all they had to support their life in a new country. That’s not how we are responding. Our fear of loss is greater than the fear that we won’t survive.

Although attitudes to authority have changed, the expectation remains that those in charge should sort out the problems, that they know what needs to be done, and will do it.

Communications systems are very different than those on the Titanic, but that doesn’t mean that they are more effective. I suggest that there is a great deal of top-down information; we hear what those with power and influence would like us to hear. We are still in the age of Murdoch. While there are independent sources, these operate at the margins and against a headwind of algorithmic bias and disinformation. Those at lower echelons of society can communicate a great deal with one another, and we do. But still missing is the bottom-up traffic that would enable leaders to make fully informed decisions. This is relatively easy to see at the societal level, but I believe it is essential that we recognise it in organisations too.

The leadership issue compounds the two above. It is hard for leaders to be well-informed, and they operate with very widely varying perceptions of what authority means, or even what it should mean. There is a gulf between what is expected of them (and what they expect of themselves) and what it is possible for them to deliver. In the midst of volatility, complexity and rapid pace of change, the stresses are well-documented. Leaders are burning out despite wellness programs and are still expected to manage their organisations as if they are machines, when they are living systems. That is unsustainable. We are taking on water.

If the class question was over-emphasised in the Titanic story, that would not be the case for us, now, except that it is not about class in that old sense. We don’t have the same aristocracies, but more than ever, we have massive inequality of power, wealth and influence. It was true of the USA two centuries ago that it didn’t matter who was the President, but who owned the President. That is not now, if it ever was, an exclusively American problem. Governments all over are subject to it, with corporate lobbying and voter influence through controlled media.

Are we on the Titanic? I think that my conclusions are clear, but I don’t say this with the intention of persuading you that we are doomed, quite the opposite. The various factors in the story, and in today’s life conditions, are ones that we can change. We can apply fresh, relational perspectives. We can operate our organisations as living systems. We can accept that stepping out of denial means changing our behaviours today, not at some future time. We can increase the bottom-up communication and be more discerning about the narratives we are being fed.

We haven’t hit the iceberg yet. Radar systems were invented 40 years too late for the Titanic and we have so much more data and predictive capability.

What do you think?

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

I am offering a deep-dive individual development workshop experience and SDi Level 2 certification starting in late February. You can find further information here

PS: The Audio-book and E-book versions of my new book “What makes you You?” is now also available! Find it here

As a thank you for being a reader or subscriber to my Substack, please download your free copy of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
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It is good for us to review, so I will take the opportunity to treat what is in fact, an arbitrary date change as if it is significant. I sense I am not alone in feeling that 2025 went by very fast.

Is that perhaps one more sign of how complex and volatile the world has become, more busy than ever, filled yet more by stimuli and demands from events, social media and urgent tasks. The pace is literally breathless and apparently incoherent.

It has also been scarier than ever to observe leaders who vary between destructively unhinged and chronically out of their depth. The former are part of a long tradition in the world. From time to time, we are presented with individuals with an appetite for raw power and we see again how bad humans are at either recognising them or preventing their ascent. With the latter, we face a different challenge. The problems they face are unsolvable with the tools that they have.

We should by now be familiar with the conditions that are termed “polycrisis” or “metacrisis”. Climate instability, ecological damage, economic inequality and migration pressures are just a few of the big-picture problems; they are all scary, and we (the human collective) don’t want to look at them. At the same time, there is an expectation that our leaders will provide solutions without inconveniencing us.

Closing down or growing up

We seem to operate in a strange kind of limbo. Individually, though many are depressed or anxious, most of us are not suicidal; we want to survive, physically, emotionally and materially. We would take every step to deal with any direct threat to that. We would protect our children, too. Collectively we seem to be the opposite. Planet-level and even national-level breakdowns alike leave most unmoved and resisting change. The challenges are consigned to the “Somebody Else’s Problem” Field. “We” need to change, but “I” don’t. It is a kind of catatonia in which humans wait for death to arrive.

I suggest that 2026 needs to be a year of growing up, of acting like adults who no longer fantasise that mummy and daddy government can work magic, regardless of parties or leaders. Economies are fragile, and there are no magic tax wands. Health systems are expensive and will not cope with all demands of ageing populations or even a more deadly strain of flu. Climate and ecologies present long-term problems with no easy fixes, still less ones that will not have consequences for our lifestyles when economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Democracies are stressed and cannot please all the people, all of the time. There are no magic bullets around migration, and even if there were, that wouldn’t fix the societal problems some imagine or pretend they would.

So, can we grow up? Despite all I have said, I am an optimist. I believe 2026 will usher in a transition. That doesn’t mean that I expect it to be easy. It seems likely that for many, waking up and growing up will need a stronger trigger. The increasing frequency of floods and forest fires hasn’t done it. Covid19 didn’t do it. Nor can most people join the dots between the many reasons why food prices have increased. This world has become too complex to understand. Even though this is my area of special interest and imagined above-average skill, I find it increasingly difficult.

I assume that if you are drawn to read this Substack, you are likely to be thinking about these questions and more aware of the problems than the average person. If my speculation is correct, you too may have the feeling that a more intense critical event is coming, both because the systemic fragility makes it inevitable and only a matter of time, and because it is necessary for our human future that we get the message. Put another way, it is like being with a toddler who nags and begs until you snap, and shout that you are not buying an ice-cream. If you share the perspective that there is a planetary consciousness, it has only just begun to shout. I anticipate a louder wake-up call.

A different response

So, what are we to do, those of us who are not waiting? Perhaps you are already doing a lot. But it is possible that you are wondering what else, or what more? I don’t know, can’t tell you specifics, and I shouldn’t, because I am not standing where you are, experiencing what you experience. But I can say something.

One pervasive illusion that has come through our histories is the belief in top-down answers supplied by some kind of authority, whether divine, religious, political, autocratic, ancestral or written dogma. This may have held things together in simpler times, but no-one fitting those descriptions can see enough, process sufficient information or have enough intelligence for the conditions we are in. Even if they did, they could not issue instructions to the thousands of people or systems that need to change. It’s the opposite of agile. We need to jettison this thinking - and not only as nations – it applies to organisations too, even small-to-medium ones.

The two simple principles I am about to suggest apply across many spheres of our collective activities. We urgently need a shift to bottom-up thinking and action. The rationale for this is that each person sees part of the picture and has a relationship with whatever is present in their world, so there is more information available at the individual level, accompanied by the appropriate intelligence to produce a response. You don’t ask your brain to decide what your liver or bladder should do minute by minute. They are largely self-governing subsystems. You certainly don’t expect it to direct 40 trillion individual cells. This is the nature of collaborative, living systems.

Firstly, do what you can, where you are, with what you have, based on what you see, sense, think and detect.

Secondly, the first principle indicates mixed ways of relating. There is a blend of explicit and cognitive modes of brain activity with intuitive, embodied and emotional awareness. This is often described as balancing left-brain and right-brain functions, and I am inviting you to add Field awareness and recognition that your entire body acts as a sensing organ. Your body is mind all over. The increased application of available intelligence is not based only on growing the numbers involved. That growth is compounded by our choices to engage a wider bandwidth in the types of intelligence we are applying.

I give much more information on this perspective in “What makes You YOU?” and will say more over time in these posts. For now, the task is to be intentional about taking this new perspective and making our choices on this basis. Amid all the excitement or fear about AI, and allowing for the possibility that well-directed AI may have a supporting contribution to make, please note that some of the sensing and intelligences I am referring to are not (as yet) available to machines. It’s down to us.

I would like us to go beyond the oft-quoted truism that “you cannot solve problems using the same levels of thinking that created them”. For sure, the choice of bottom-up perspectives brings a new level of thinking. But increasing the intuitive and whole-system sensing adds a different modality of “thinking”. The originator of that quote was also famous for believing in intuition and inspiration. We may not all become Einsteins, but like him, we can bring problem-solving capacities that are significantly beyond those that we have used before.

Field Coherence

The central concept for Relational Being is that existence is much less about the things in the world than it is about the relationships between things. (See “What use is a wheel?”). This concept rests on the recognition that there is an Informational Field that governs reality. The Information Field is ever-changing, but ultimately self-balancing. Observed locally or in short spans of time, it is turbulent and chaotic, far from equilibrium, because we can’t see the patterns. Zooming out, ordering principles become more visible.

As described by complexity scientist Ilya Prigogine, “When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system.” The patterns that life has made, how consciousness (fields of information) has connected to produce all that we know, exist because small islands of coherence were created in the past. These became the structures we recognise, everything from electrons to elephants.

What created the past is also what makes the future. Our role is to develop small islands of coherence, in ourselves, with others and in systems such that we help shape the patterns that unfold. That is what doing what you can, where you are, with what you have is about.

My desire for 2026 is to witness and support a growth in our capacity to be and co-create small islands of coherence. My optimism is rooted in that potential. Wherever this post may have seemed pessimistic, it reflects the challenge and the stimulus for us to grow into that space.

I wish you a restful seasonal break and a coherent and flourishing 2026.

PS: The Audio-book and E-book versions of my new book “What makes you You?” is now also available! Find it here

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

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Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

As a thank you for being a reader or subscriber to my Substack, please download your free copy of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
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The previous articles in this series first examined the way in which healthy human existence would be supported naturally by conditions that create for each of us a sense of safety, secure belonging, and coherent, empowered personal identity.
We then looked at the failure in our modern world to create those conditions, and the consequences in terms of the coping behaviours and ill-health that can lead to.

Understanding the depth of disruption could lead to despair, but there is another possibility. When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. Healing is possible - both for individuals and for cultures - but it requires us to return to foundations rather than trying to transcend them.

At the societal level, restoration must begin with how we treat the earliest phases of life. This means reducing stress and increasing support for mothers during pregnancy. It means de-medicalizing birth and recognizing it as a natural process. It means providing real support and time for mothers to be with their infants - not just a few weeks but the months and even years that attachment requires. It means refusing to leave children to cry, recognizing that responding to their needs is not spoiling them but building their foundation of security.

Family life needs protection from the intrusions that fragment connection. This means reducing dependency on electronic devices as child-minders and parental distractions. It means creating opportunities for children to play with peers of varied ages, learning social and emotional skills through interaction rather than instruction. It means removing unrealistic expectations from children whose language and cognitive capacities are not yet developed, and responding to their behaviour with loving boundaries that correct actions while upholding the dignity of the child.

These changes require questioning many cultural norms. We must ask why economic systems make it so hard for families to have adequate time together. We must confront the devaluation of caregiving and the elevation of productivity above relationship. We must recognize that the hyper-individualism celebrated in modern culture undermines the communal bonds essential for human flourishing. We must rebuild social structures that support rather than isolate families, that value the work of raising children, that honour the time and attention development requires.

For individuals already shaped by disruption, healing follows a similar pattern of return and integration. It begins with moving intentionally out of self-suppression - becoming willing to feel what we have learned to numb, to revisit what happened in childhood with attention and acceptance rather than judgment or denial. This is not about blame but about understanding how we adapted to survive and recognizing that those adaptations, while once necessary, may no longer serve us.

The work requires willingness to change patterns of living and to confront the low-grade addictions we use for coping. It means focusing on reduction of life stresses where possible and developing emotional intelligence, cooperation skills, and healthier ways of relating to authority and hierarchy. It means learning techniques for nervous system self-regulation; breath-work, somatic practices, methods that help balance brain hemispheres and restore access to intuition and sensing capacities. It is the journey from head to heart, and all needs to be represented in our education systems.

Most fundamentally, healing requires a shift from seeking to integrate pieces of ourselves - which is still typically a mental construction - to cultivating coherence, which is an embodied, sensory, and even spiritual task. Coherence emerges when the different phases of development can all be present and active, no longer competing or suppressed but working together as the harmonics they were meant to be.

What would such coherence look like? A life free from constant existential threat and anxiety. Connection experienced as love without producing hatred of those who are different. Empowerment and secure identity that manifests as power-to rather than power-over. An inner sense of purpose and morality that doesn’t require external coercion. The ability to pursue excellence without exploitation of people or planet. Natural tolerance of diversity arising from security rather than threat. This is not utopian fantasy but rather the restoration of what human development was always meant to produce.

Reclaiming the Foundations

The early phases of human development are not primitive stages to be transcended and left behind. They are the architectural foundations upon which everything else rests. Like the foundation of a building, they must remain sound and active even as higher storeys are added. When we try to build sophisticated structures on disrupted foundations, instability is inevitable.

We do not grow by skipping or ignoring our roots. We grow by returning to them, by ensuring they remain vital and healthy, by recognizing that embodiment, connection, and authentic individual expression are not obstacles to higher development but its necessary ground. The task before us - individually and collectively - is to restore what modernity has disrupted: the conditions that allow human beings to develop coherently from biological existence through secure bonding, healthy individual emergence, meaningful social belonging, and onward into whatever further possibilities await.

This is not a rejection of progress but a re-calibration of its direction. The question is not whether to advance but how to advance in ways that honour rather than fragment the human beings who make up our societies. The evidence is clear: we cannot build flourishing communities, quality organizations or sustainable cultures on foundations of developmental deficit and systemic disconnection. We must do the harder work of creating conditions where human development can unfold as it was meant to - embodied, relational, and whole.

Each stage of development is sacred. Each phase of becoming deserves honouring. Each aspect of what forms us requires recognition.

To ascend, we must first re-honour the base.

This is the work of our time: not to fix what is broken through force or optimization, but to engage in a loving and tender archaeological dig back to our true selves, our true communities. From those foundations we can then build a coherent modern world with people-oriented societies and in doing so, release our true potential as healthy, happy human beings.

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

As a thank you for being a subscriber to my Substack, please download your free copy of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
Download it here

And looking ahead: my new book, “What Makes You You? Discover the hidden forces that shaped your being and how to choose your becoming”, will be launching in soon! In it, I go deeper into these questions, exploring who we are within these interwoven fields of experience and relationship. Read more about it here.

When fundamental developmental needs go unmet, human beings adapt. But these adaptations come at a high cost. The strategies we develop to cope with deprivation, inconsistency, and disconnection become woven into our very sense of self. We mistake survival patterns for our true identity.

The research evidence is overwhelming. Disrupted early attachment predicts difficulties with emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, and stress management throughout life. Childhood trauma - including not just dramatic abuse but also emotional neglect - shows up decades later in higher rates of chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, and cancer. The stress of discrimination and marginalization literally accelerates biological aging, shortening telomeres and adding years to the biological age of affected individuals.

Describing these conditions as trauma may seem over-inflated if we view that term as denoting extreme events, as it often does. For most humans, the harm is subtle, less high-impact, but more part of a continuum. Maybe we need a different word for that. It is its very normality which leads us to overlook its consequences. It happens to people with good parents.

When development is disrupted, people remain locked in survival mode. Fear becomes the constant undercurrent of existence: fear of physical threat, fear of economic loss, fear of being wrong and punished, fear of being unsuccessful and without prestige, fear that we will lose our tribe, fear that others will have power over us. These survival fears create systemic incoherence - physiologically, emotionally, and cognitively. The nervous system remains activated, unable to fully rest, constantly scanning for danger, desperate to control.

To manage this dis-regulation, we turn to coping mechanisms. Some addictions are well-recognized: alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography. Others are so normalized that we barely see them as problematic: over consumption of caffeine and junk food, compulsive shopping and hoarding, overwork that leaves no space for rest, endless hours of television watching or online gaming. These are not weaknesses or moral failures but adaptive strategies - attempts to numb discomfort, to fill the void left by unmet developmental needs.

Consider the adult who excels in productivity but cannot rest, whose nervous system never feels safe because they are never enough, never worthy. Their identity has been formed in trauma, not truth. They have learned that worth comes from doing rather than being, that rest is dangerous, that to stop working is to risk abandonment or punishment. This person may be highly successful by conventional standards, yet they are not free. They are running an old program, responding to threats that are no longer present, cut off from their authentic self.

The tragedy is that these patterns often pass invisibly through generations. Parents who never received secure attachment struggle to provide it to their children. Communities that have normalized disconnection cannot model connection. Economic systems that devalue care and relationship perpetuate conditions that make healthy development nearly impossible. What supposedly primitive indigenous cultures would refuse to countenance becomes redefined as normal, and we lose our reference point for health.

What would be required to change these patterns? That will be the subject of the next article.

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

As a thank you for being a subscriber to my Substack, please download your free copy of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
Download it here

And looking ahead: my new book, “What Makes You You? Discover the hidden forces that shaped your being and how to choose your becoming”, will be launching in December. In it, I go deeper into these questions, exploring who we are within these interwoven fields of experience and relationship. Read more about it here.

What if the greatest challenge facing humanity isn’t a lack of progress, but rather the hidden costs of the progress we’ve already made? What if our modern ways of living, the very structures we’ve built to advance civilization, are systematically disrupting the foundational processes through which human beings develop into whole, coherent persons?

This is not an argument against modernity itself, but rather an invitation to understand how certain modern practices, beliefs, and cultural patterns have created conditions that fragment human development at its most critical stages. The evidence is mounting: from childhood through adulthood, contemporary life increasingly separates us from the embodied, relational foundations essential for psychological health and authentic being.

The Architecture of Human Becoming

Human development unfolds through distinct phases, each building upon the last in a recursive spiral of becoming. These are not simple linear stages to be transcended and left behind, but rather foundational harmonics of selfhood that must remain active and integrated throughout life. To understand the disruption, we must first understand what healthy development requires.

At the most fundamental level, we emerge from biological existence - our genetic inheritance, the epigenetic influences that shape our unfolding, and the cosmological patterns present even before birth. This embodied foundation is not merely physical but informational, carrying forward influences from family systems, ancestral patterns, and the conditions surrounding our mothers during pregnancy and birth. The question from Zen Buddhism asks: “What was your face before you were born?” This points to the deep reality that we are shaped by forces that precede our individual consciousness.

From this biological ground, we next require bonding and psychological safety - what we might call the establishment of roots. In infancy, we learn whether the world is fundamentally safe through the quality of nurturing we receive, through being held, responded to, and experiencing unconditional love from mother and family. This is where we internalize our deepest sense of belonging, our connection to others and to our environment. Attachment patterns formed here shape how we relate to the world for the rest of our lives.

We are wounded in relationship and must therefore also heal in relationship - yet the modern world increasingly isolates the mother, the child, and the family.

— Gabor Maté

As the child grows, the emergence of will and individuality becomes essential. The “terrible twos” are not a problem to be suppressed but a necessary phase where the child discovers their independent identity, learns to say “no” and “mine,” and begins to differentiate themselves from others. This requires parents who can hold firm but not rigid boundaries - who can address behavior without making the child feel fundamentally unacceptable. Too much or too harsh discipline can crush the development of healthy ego strength. Too little structure fails to support the development of emotional self-regulation and impulse control.

Following this, children need to establish their sense of belonging within larger social structures and develop the moral codes that will guide their lives. Historically, this came through religious and cultural systems that provided purpose, meaning, and a sense of participating in a common enterprise with shared destiny. While specific forms may change, the need for this foundation of identity and purpose remains constant.

These early phases - from biological existence through bonding, individual emergence, and social belonging - are fundamentally embodied, emotional, and relational. They are not primarily cognitive or mental constructs. They happen through lived experience, through the body, through connection with others. When these foundations are solid, they create the possibility for further development: the capacity for strategic thinking and achievement, the ability to embrace diversity and seek harmony, and ultimately the emergence of integrated, coherent being.

This is not what is happening. In the next article we will look at what has gone wrong, and why.

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

As a thank you for being a subscriber to my Substack, please download your free copy of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
Download it here

And looking ahead: my new book, “What Makes You You? Discover the hidden forces that shaped your being and how to choose your becoming”, will be launching in December. In it, I go deeper into these questions, exploring who we are within these interwoven fields of experience and relationship. Read more about it here.

The site isn’t just newly designed - it reflects a deeper, relational understanding of who we are and how we shape our lives. My work explores what it means to be a “Relational Being”: to recognize that we are fundamentally interconnected - with people, with systems, with the wider world.

This perspective shifts everything. When we live from relatedness instead of isolation, we unlock potentials for creativity, flow, and meaningful change - both personally and together.

The new site offers insights and practical tools for exploring this reality. You’ll find resources to help you discover how your identity is formed not only by your inner world but also by your relationships and how you engage with the field of life itself.

As a thank you for being a subscriber to my Substack, you’ll receive a free download of “9 Days to Change Your Reality” - A journey through the information field.
Download it here

And looking ahead: my new book, “What Makes You You? Discover the hidden forces that shaped your being and how to choose your becoming”, will be launching in December. In it, I go deeper into these questions, exploring who we are within these interwoven fields of experience and relationship. Read more about it here.

I invite you to visit the new site, claim your free resource, and join me as we explore the adventure of Relational Being together.

With appreciation and curiosity,

Jon Freeman - Relational Being
Architect of Relational Systems
Stabilising Coherence in Human Beings and Human Systems
www.jonfreeman.co.uk

Read my Series of 4 Posts about Relational being here to explore what we mean by living as a Relational Being in the information field.

• A New Way to Navigate Your World

• Who are You in a Relational World?

• Engaging with the Field

• Outer Relationships the Outer River

There is a moment – quiet, maybe disorienting, often unspoken – when something in us knows before it can explain.

How often have you been present when a decision was taken that somewhere in your body you felt would be wrong, but didn’t know why. And how often have you watched that play out?

You might be in a leadership meeting, a change initiative, or deep in strategic planning. Everyone's speaking fluently in the language of metrics, frameworks, outcomes. And yet – somewhere in the space – you feel the system trying to whisper something else. It isn’t easy to hear what that whisper is saying. Asking to pause, to listen, is not the way it is done.

This is the moment where many feel paralysed, because no one taught us how to speak from that place. Even if you know how, perhaps it doesn’t feel acceptable. And if you are the odd-one-out who intentionally practices sensing awareness or has a spiritual orientation, you've likely felt that your inner work doesn't have a language that lands in boardrooms, decision tables, or systems design.

Here, I am writing for both the ones who don’t know but feel something, and the ones who know but can’t speak. I have been both. I have oscillated between two worlds and sometimes still do, even though I know they are not separate and not different. That is a scientific truth, but we have been taught something else, and our habits, particularly in business, are to treat them as two worlds. The truth is that they are one field – fragmented only by language, tempo, and the training of attention.

It has seemed as if you have to split yourself to survive and I am not alone in having done so. I spent a lot of my work life in that closet, occasionally coming out to a few people I trusted or whom I thought knew me well enough not to be dismissive. Sometimes I could say just enough to cause a pause to happen. Occasionally I could couch my intuition in rational ways that might influence a meeting.

This Substack is a bridge.
A threshold space for those who are sensing the new, but still fluent in the old.
For leaders who suspect intuition isn’t soft, but strategic.
For seekers who want their inner work to ripple outward in grounded, systemic ways.

We may not be able to build the bridge here, but we might sit in the gap together and listen for what’s wanting to cross.

With you in the listening,
Jon

Resources:
If you are looking for Organisational Development support, including Team and Leadership Development, there is information here.

Explore more on my website

Find my books at:
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out

The diagram above is far from literal. It is intended to indicate gradations in how close or distant our relating is to our world. As such, it connects to the previous post in this series which was concerned with the innermost, white ellipse. In addition, it serves as an approximate map for this article which will focus on the middle band (mauve) and the following two about the amber and pale blue ellipses. Each of these in turn increases in scale and in a kind of distancing from us.

In one sense this is tricky, since we are embedded in all of it, and equally close. You are as close in actual physical distance to your country as you are to your home since you can be in both at the same time. The difference being indicated is one of immediate impact and relevance to your daily existence. Your actions have more effect on those you live with or your work colleagues than they do on the city or the nation.

Just as your thoughts affect your body and biology, where we have no difficulty in recognising the proximity, your information field is more closely interconnected with those you interact with most. That may mean that a child who is on the other side of the world is as connected as one you live with. The Information Field does not operate on geographical distance. We are dealing here with some sense of degrees of engagement. That is not a precise concept, but it is good enough to work with.

Note, too, that with people the degree of engagement is bi-directional. It is not necessarily equal, though. You are not in charge of it either. Other people may be thinking about you and influencing your field more than you are affecting them. And other systems in the Field also have their impact. Consider the impact on your being from a change in your nation’s tax laws. Consider the amount of attention that may be engaged in an election or a company reorganisation.

As was stated when discussing how we relate to and through our bodies, life has its existence in the space of relationality. So that we don’t forget, I will keep repeating that this is where being and experiencing happen, and it remains true as we look at what surrounds us. I am inviting us to change the way that we operate in the world, and that means changing how we think about ourselves and about it.

We are still working here with the image of the river. Within the flows, there is the flow that is you and the flow that you are within. There are streams and eddies in the flow that are nearer to us, affecting us more strongly and more rapidly affected by our own movements. There are streams that are further away, but which are affecting the currents and ripples that are near to us. And there are flows that shape the whole river, the ones that have carved out the banks or scoured the depths. They may not change much or may only change slowly, but even so, they can bring changes to our own flow. Think perhaps of the world of disease ecologies in human populations and compare the effect on you of a new variety of the common cold to the impact of Covid.

The above is a preamble to some investigation of the more local fields that you may be engaged with. As we look at these examples, I will also draw attention to the difference between what we may be aware of and what we can affect. These are different aspects of our relating to the Field and if we want to operate effectively in the world, we need to understand the implications that has for us.

Family

How much does your family define you? What parts of your life continue to be shaped by their expectations, both stated and implied? The answers to such questions will vary widely. Comedies and dramas are filled with demanding mothers or mothers-in law, powerful heads of commercial dynasties. Such shows are popular precisely because we recognise them, perhaps as our own experience writ large or maybe with some gratitude – at least mine isn’t so bad.

Within the family, each relationship is distinct. Your siblings are not all the same. You may have a favourite grandma and another whom you avoid. Each of them has shaped us and may continue to do so. We may choose to stay close, or they may drive us to emigrate in self-protection.

Simultaneously, within the family there may be commonality – collective ways of being that you have been part of and which surface at every wedding, funeral or Thanksgiving. Does your family have complete allowance for you to be the person you choose to be? Does it have zero opinions and judgements about what you do, whom you marry and how you vote? In my imagination I don’t hear a loud chorus of “yes” to those questions. How about you?

The family system typically inhabits a place in the river that is in close proximity. Your influence on it, or lack of it, and its ongoing flows around and into you are likely to play a big part in who you are. So, I am inviting you to consider how that has been for you and how it shows up now.

What would you wish to change? Can you change it? Can you change how you respond to it? What would it take for you to do so, and what does the ease or difficulty that you perceive have to say about the strength of that part of your field?

Work

Many of us spend a lot of time at work. Even those of us who work remotely or run self-employed businesses have regular interactions with clients, suppliers, network connections and colleagues.

Each of these may have direct influence on who we are and what we choose. We may be influencing them, too. As previously, the influences may be overt, subtle or in the Field.

The sector in which you operate has its own habits and belief systems as well as processes and regulatory frameworks. Civil engineering is not the same as selling consumer goods. What have you taken on from their attitudes? What and whom are you accepting and aligning with, or maybe tolerating through gritted teeth? Are you the same person at work as at home, or are you shaping yourself to fit their template and expectations?

My various work environments have certainly shaped me, sometimes in ways I appreciate. Some were toxic and I learned how hard it may be to exit, as well as how essential to my well-being.

Possessions and Home

Does this heading surprise you? It may be less obvious than others, but what you own has an impact on your existence and much of it draws you into some kind of relationship. In quite a few cases you are possessed by them as much as them by you.

Most of what you own becomes an overhead. A lot of it requires maintenance. Things wear out or rust out and must be replaced. Even things that you don’t actively use take space to store. Devices consume electricity or need battery replacement. Thinking of them as objects, separate from us, is a partial truth. We imagine that they are a one-night stand and find that we are married to them.

Owning a house is a commitment that makes relocation a very big deal. The direct financial demands are obvious, but a larger home brings higher energy and upkeep costs. There is more to clean. Of course there are positives – space for family, the pleasure of a better environment, the room for hobbies. Compared with rental, you gain the freedom to make it what you want it to be.

Some of our possessions define us. Where we live can be a statement of identity. A car may be a functional choice, but years of advertising tell us that for many people they are more than that. They are public statements about how we want to be seen, and about our intended relationship with the world. They may also say things that we don’t like, about our unfulfilled aspirations and the gaps between how the world views us and how we see ourselves.

The point is not whether your choices are right or wrong – that is up to you. It is to be aware of the relational space that is involved and the two-way influences that show up in every one of them. You may have thought that you are in control. Is that as true as you have believed? Are there unforeseen consequences that arise in the relational space because we didn’t even see that they are there?

Finances

Is money important? To you? To the world? Here I need to condense into a few paragraphs what can easily be the subject of a whole book. In fact, I wrote one. It explores how our relationships with and feelings about money have shaped our world, caused its dysfunctions, and what it might take to change that, both from the inside and outside.

Whatever your personal feelings about the importance of money, you can’t deny that for most people it has a massive priority. Every election backs up that statement over and over again. How many politicians do you know who have promised you less or said that they won’t grow the economy? It can seem as if those are practical debates about reality. It can seem as if they are about big systems and that we are at the effect of them. Not so.

The truth is that collectively, we have built the system. It reflects human desires and emotions, our aspirations and fears. Humans have fear of lack and fear of loss. We may want to have power and control over our world, and we use money for that. We have impulses to create and build. We can be greedy and self-centred or we may feel we are victims to others who are.

We may want to care for others, who may be close like our families, or maybe where we have empathy or compassion at a global scale. We may believe that we have a duty to do so and feel shame or guilt that we do not. Now, we want to care for the planet and to stop causing damage, but don’t know how to bring that about and we think that can only be done by others who wield power that we ourselves lack.

All of the above operates in the relational space. Whether we can see it or not, we created the system as a reflection of who we are and we maintain it through our ongoing choices and attitudes. We want it to be different, but we don’t want it to change us. At the same time, we know that it must. We create shared myths that say we have 25 years to do so when the breakdowns are already happening. We are deeply conflicted at every level.

I have placed finances in this post about local relationships. That is because of our daily lives, and how our thinking about money shapes our personal choices. Equally, it is because our daily choices are affected by events in the world like sanctions, wars and tariffs, by migration patterns and by global systems such as currency fluctuations. Everything is connected.

The scale of those interconnections can make us feel powerless, unable to influence the future. That is not so – in fact, we are the only ones who can, because even those with power and control depend on us. The relational space is where we make that felt, but we will only do so when we ourselves change.

Are you ready for that? And what will it take?

Resources:
If you are looking for Organisational Development support, including Team and Leadership Development, there is information here. Click the button for an introductory call.

Find my books at:
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out