Capra Course Live Presentation
View the live presentation recording here
On December 2024’s Winter Solstice, Mansoor was the special guest of the Capra Course Alumni Gathering.
Mansoor Vakili lead the Capra Course Alumni in a viewing and discussion of the new short film Unlocking a Paradigm Shift: The Nonlinear View and Deep Simplicity of the Self-organizing Universe. The video and accompanying writings are the result of more than 30 years of work developing this concept and 15 years or so of receiving direct feedback from Fritjof at the various stages of the process. Mansoor will introduce the film, we will watch it together, Fritjof will provide commentary and then we will discuss the film and its themes as a community.
The gathering was held on Friday, Dec 20th from 7 - 8:30pm PST and it was open to all Capra Course alumni.
A bit about our guest, Mansoor Vakili: With over thirty years of inner journeying, self-exploration, and experimentation Mansoor’s self-driven passion has led him to become versed in the areas of philosophy, quantum mechanics, network theory, cognitive theory, and systems theory as well as various spiritual wisdom traditions from around the world. His independent research led him to connect with Fritjof Capra, and to become a part of one of the first Capra Course cohorts, and eventually to receive direct guidance and feedback from Frijof. Today, Mansoor lives with his family in southern California where he enjoys mountain biking, hiking, being in nature, connecting through the heart and the poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Khayam, and continuing to apply and refine his research in his daily life.
To deepen the live discussion in December, our guest Mansoor Vakili and his team invite you to explore their short animation and website before the Alumni Gathering and to please share any feelings or questions that arise with selforgorg@gmail.com.
Presentation
Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us during such a busy time of the year. Thank you Frijof and Della and Silvia for inviting me to share this work with you. Thanks to Chris, a fellow Capra Course Alumni member, for your support over the past few years. And especially to Fritjof, as you have been key in guiding me through this project for many years, and so I am happy to share it with you now.
As you know, we are facing a metacrisis. This metacrisis is a systemic crisis, and so it requires a systemic solution to the current chaos that we are experiencing.
But is there a way for us to view chaos as an opportunity for emergent solutions?
We are at a point in history where we have developed enough science and observation tools to guide us.
When we observe our universe that is made of billions of galaxies that within them have billions of stars that have gone through so many super novas to eventually locally create
Our solar system with the sun at its center…
Which is made of 97% Helium + Hydrogen, the simplest elements…
To sustain this green planet…
And support the life of unicellular organisms, all the way to human beings who can now have a conversation about it.
This is clearly an amazingly creative and efficient process.
And if we look at the human body that is allowing us to even have this conversation, we can see this process too.
How, in order to take one word from my mind to your mind, 4 million neurons and cells are synchronizing between you and I, while at the same time my body is also regulating my enzymes, oxygen levels, and other metabolic processes, with minimum effort + without any central command.
This process is observable everywhere in Earth’s inhabitants and Earth itself: from how bees dance to communicate and organize, to fun-gal networks sharing resources among plant and soil networks.
And how storms in Africa’s Sahara Desert can bring minerals to the Amazon Rainforest. The wind that carries minerals across the ocean creates a static charge in the clouds above the Amazon that form lightning, which acts as a catalyst for chemical reactions between nitrogen, oxygen, and other minerals that provide nutrients for the plants below. Those plants then convert photons received from the sun into sugars, and ultimately protein and oxygen for the other inhabitants of Earth.
So what is behind this creative and efficient process?
Why aren’t we acting according to this level of creativity that created us?
And how can we as a byproduct of this process realign or synchronize with it?
Systems theory is indicating that:
Behind this amazingly creative and efficient process is a self-organizing quality.
Network theory can guide us to see that:
The pattern of organization of the self-organizing process is the nonlinear network that can provide the essential behaviors of this creative process.
Nonlinear networks are capable of performing within the chaotic zone by becoming fractal, where members of the network synchronize their assets to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
But during humankind’s self-awareness process, we made an approximate linear model that illusively separated us from the universe, and we created judgmental linear thinking.
And to protect this illusively separated identity, we created relationships based in self-assertiveness, short-term gain, domination, and liability management, which helped us to survive and now…
In this nonlinear world its dominance is endangering our survival.
However, the linear model’s achievement is that we can now use linear logic to explain nonlinear systems, which can guide us to realign with the greater system we’re a part of.
By observing the body network (and especially the brain), we can investigate how the domination of the linear model has led us to become out of sync with the greater process, and where this paradigm shift can begin in the brain and body networks.
Because of the universality of nonlinear networks, discovering where we can realign within the brain and body network can metaphorically apply to any network at any scale.
In this way, the body serves as a guide to understand the message that Earth is trying to communicate to us, as we are a part of it.
I hope this animation provides some more information as well as inspire questions that we can explore in collaboration to bring out the unique potential of the Capra Course Alumni network.
