While there are an amazing variety of answers to that today, the one I gravitate to is that the question is very meaningful to everyone. We all have a clear understanding of what the words “happen” and “happening” mean. We know they have to do with the changing “organization” of things that “matter” to us. Some may not realize it, but there are no comparable scientific definitions for those deeply meaningful parts of life.

You could ask your favorite web chat sites, TwitterX or Bluesky , your search sites, like Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Yahoo, Internet Archive or your AI wizards like Gemini, ChatGPT, or knowledge bases. Try asking a) or b):

a) The most serious issue: “How can our world escape the apparent doom cycle we’re in of ever-escalating mistakes and tragedy, destabilizing our societies and the whole living environment.”

b) The more open:
“What is really happening to us?”

In your search, are you finding anything about what’s happening to us as occurring naturally or happening to all other kinds of growth systems, too? The truth is people all naturally know a WHOLE lot about “what’s happening” that science is unable to detect or describe, as happening is natural.

There is a simple scientific reason. It’s that human knowledge develops from experience in the living contests of growth and change as part of nature. Science searches for perpetual and unchanging truths that can be stripped of context in order to define answers with measurable, absolute certainty.

Life is lively, though, and nature created organisms to become highly skilled in negotiating the often rapidly changing worlds around them. So humans are quite an exception in finding ourselves unable to respond to growing crises like climate change, economic overshoot, societal conflict, and ecological catastrophe.

What I use is a practice anyone can use to improve their observations of what’s happening and find where the changes come from. It starts with learning to *feel the rates of change.* It’s very often what we react to, something coming on slowly, quickly, or suddenly. It may be feeling it in your gut, in your throat, in your eyes, or in other ways, sensing a need to respond to signals of change in relationships that matter.

With practice, one can learn to mentally trace those feelings to the specific things one is responding to well enough to tell what else is connected. The rates of change are key. They tell you whether it’s a 1) steady change, 2) accelerating, 3) a growing system, or a 4) fluctuating pattern.

Those shapes of change over time can be used to find and connect with other parts of it since **change is a system, and all its linked parts tend to move together** as for economic growth, as shown below. Notice how constant the growth rates are. They trace nature’s most radical process of developing new systems, which may then tear them apart. So.. “Good question.”

The general shape of all these stable concentric curves (having the same exponential origin) is that some of the subsystems are changing slower, but they’re all changing at what has become an explosive rate relative to what’s manageable on Earth, rearranging the earth ever faster than anyone thought possible. That appears to be why we don’t know what to do.

So, my casual research practice (before a long-term study, perhaps) starts with noticing something and seeing what’s happening around it. That’s how you find what’s moving in the same way, implying the organization of the system connects them. That’s very helpful, as with personal relationships, so that you can find and respond to the right things.

Societal relationships show similar diverging coupled rates of change as the economy. With societal changes, we are much more aware of the resulting disruptive crises of conflict in relationships, as those are where we live our lives. The reason is that change in everything is being accelerated to its limits of breakdown or misbehavior. It pushes every system to the threshold of it breaking apart. Yikes…

As these changes are at different paces and raising different unfamiliar complications for everyone, we even find the people pushing this endless radical rearrangement of the world (mostly using the financial system) being quite blind to their contexts and the fragility of living systems pushed to reorganize ever faster.

From my long-term studies of it, all of what’s happening to us is ‘natural’, if also rather negligent given the failure to successfully respond. Growth is a system of compound accelerating change that invariably creates a crisis for itself. You might say nature uses it for blowing up new designs for life to see if they’ll respond by stabilizing their designs before growth rips them apart, or not.

Some growth systems tip from multiplying to unifying and maturing very early in their growth – to have a long rich life… and others tip rather late on miss that turn all together, breaking up their relationships. It’s nature’s test for living systems, choosing between emerging lives growing up and falling apart, for life, a choice.

Not noticing this quite pervasive pattern, I think, is why the modern world missed how dramatically climate change would intrude on our lives, leaving us now without a real clue as to what to do about it. I’ve been studying that kind of mysterious discrepancy between native and scientific languages for some time. Native languages have all kinds of ways to alert people to unstable change, but as that comes from feeling what’s happening, science, business, finance, government, the academy, all can’t translate it into what to do. In this case the main flaw in science causing it to not know what to do seems to be it had no practice of surveying what is going on in the contexts of the rules science and economics use, completely blind to the natural relationships the resulting activity of using the profitable rules to steer the planet.

That we’re all in this together is still the great observation.

It lets you realize that what just happened to politics in the US and around the world is part of a common struggle to hold societies together, pushed to the dangerous limit of seeing no way forward than – by breaking things. The desperate actors apparently do not realize it’s all our also common efforts to seek ever faster change (by compound investment multiplying solutions and then hidden problems they create) that’s the principle source of all great threats.

Jan 2, 2025

The rest of the article is on my research site as Whats-really-happening-to-us Below is a list of the related research reports I chose to give http://bit.ly links to:

1. A Clear Natural Signal for Moving Investment to Whole System Care
   Bit.ly/WarningGrowthOfSocietalDesperation
2. Top 100 World Crises Growing with growth
   https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf
   or https://bit.ly/TopCrises
3. 2011 paper Whole systems energy assessment.
   https://bit.ly/WholeSystemImpactAssessment
4. Warning Growth Of Societal Desperation
   https://bit.ly/WarningGrowthOfSocietalDesperatio
   https://bit.ly/WarningOfGrowingDesperation
   
5. Elected under false pretenses 
   https://bit.ly/ElectedUnderFalsePretenses
6. Cults that threaten
   https://bit.ly/CultsThreatenThoseBlindToThem
7. Etymology of ‘Cult’
   https://bit.ly/EtymologyOfCult
8. Google Ngram of cult emergence
   https://bit.ly/GoogleNgramOfChristNatEmergence
9. What cult are we
   https://bit.ly/WhatCultWeDo
10. The genome of language
    https://bit.ly/GenomeOfOurLanguage
11. Three Civ’s down one to go
    https://bit.ly/4g7TC52
12. LinkedIn – Words linking (&separating) minds and nature
    https://bit.ly/3SygvV8
13. LinkedIn – a rather strange feeling
    https://bit.ly/4f9LIYt
14. LinkedIn –  Whoa there!
    https://bit.ly/3ztQtfc
15. JLH ISSS wiki
    https://bit.ly/3WcWaqM
16. LinkedIn – Are we blinded buy search for theory?
    https://bit.ly/3Vo8KBP
17. Keynes’ Ch 16, on the limits of growth and what to do
    https://bit.ly/4bBdquV
18. Post growth plans need nature’s way of getting there
    https://bit.ly/4bxRCAf
19. Markus Feldthus on Post Growth Plans
    https://bit.ly/44VNojB
20. Post Growth Needs Nature’s Plan
    https://bit.ly/3WPf2Nf
21. Three steps higher to real sustainability
    https://bit.ly/44MaLvK
22. A long chain of collapse
    https://bit.ly/3ylTBJu
23. Growth constant fingerprints of 1780
    https://bit.ly/3JmQFi4
24. AMOC Oceanography
    https://bit.ly/3xve0v1
25. Changes that work &what we miss
    https://bit.ly/4318nR2
26. LinkedIn – Cautiously watch signs of collapse
    https://bit.ly/3SYk46z
27. 2023 ISSS – System self-organization &  self-control
    https://bit.ly/3UZpqRx
28. Feb 2024 World change slides
    https://bit.ly/3TgkhDc
29. Donate JLH
    https://bit.ly/49EUwCg
30. Fall of Rome search
    https://bit.ly/48vg9nr
31. Greek Dark Age search (Atlantis)
    https://bit.ly/3TffZwc
32. Dark Ages Search
    https://bit.ly/3OVuUZz
33. LinkedIn- Might AI effect RI (real intelligence)
    https://bit.ly/49jg5YW
34. LinkedIn – nature heals
    https://bit.ly/42eSqq0
35. Scripps CO2
    https://bit.ly/4aF0fci
36. LinkedIn – How systems steer
    https://bit.ly/3RJHFqZ
37. YouTube – Blindness to things that matter
    https://bit.ly/3trJnok
38. YouTube – What observation naturally cannot see
    https://bit.ly/3JpdzFV
39. Notes on context blindness
    https://bit.ly/3NpBWpl

___________________________________

02 JUNE 2023

It seems extraordinary that given 50 years of rapidly rising signs of deep trouble for humanity’s assumptions about life, we seem to be reinforcing our efforts to make them work, when they are clearly not. That’s absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Einstein is often quoted saying
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” That means in whatever situation we are facing, we need to rise up to a new consciousness. A new way of thinking.

But how do you do that? Well looking for exceptions to the rule for example, not just affirmations; for the growth rule, for example. If we **look around** do we find any living systems that lead healthy and successful lives that only start with growth?? Here’s a list of some of the things happening to us, at the cost of clinging to growth despite it all.

A baseline list of our existential threats we face:
Top 100+ (existential) World Crises Growing with Growth
Please suggest ones to add, either not seen before this list was written a few years ago, or not seen from my perspective
if you have ones that really would become existential for what matters please suggest them

SOME CRITICAL INSIGHTS INTO THE CRISIS

Most of the world crisis comes from grand self-deceptions; things that seemed to work for centuries (or longer) now becoming mortal threats. Literally anything multiplied enough will have that effect. well known for centuries and probably longer. Overshoot wrecks everything!

Of course, words and ideas can deceive. So it’s critical that we learn to describe our problems, threats, and efforts to resolve them in GROUNDED NATURAL LANGUAGE. Common language is understood much more widely, and is often well grounded in ancient understandings of **life’s systems in context.** That potentially makes grounded natural language highly **scientific.** Concepts and words depicting reality “out of context,” not so much.

So **incorporating grounded root meanings** connects us to reality and by linking our thinking to genuine ancient insight into reality. Humanity evolved to have multiple cultural languages some rooted some flamboyant or purely imaginary, using abstract concepts; simplified images of natural design often turned into rules for success detached from their contexts. They may be very attractive, profitable, or empowering, but detached from reality they blind us to the drift or their validity and to certain disaster when multiplied without limit.

Of course, there are other kinds of personal, social, and professional entrapment in false thinking, but the ones that most blind us to their fatal consequences; leading good moms and dads to destroying their planet, for example, are the most wicked of them all it seems. They’re true cognitive detachments and fixations. Humanity’s separation from reality has many mentions in poetry, social experience, professional study, every since the oldest story of Adam and Eve. So now it seems to be why we’re destroying a whole living planet! Today corporate growth uses it religiously to multiply their remote controls of context globally — not working so well now — but still stuck to it like glue.

See also
1) my many LinkedIn posts & comments on it, one nice pair from yesterday is at: https://bit.ly/3ZrRaNo
2) my site and research https://synapse9.com/signals, a history of research notes and papers on it. 
3) An excellent talk on how language shows clear evidence of having been built to connect us to reality: http://bit.ly/3lgdA6d   Indicating another major urgent focus of work, on how our meaningful words refer to repeatable observations and experiences.
4) My favorite https://Etymonline.com root word meaning resource used a lot for writing the material for #3

READING NATURE’S SIGNALS

This site’s name, “Reading Nature’s Signals,” is what you’ll find here is all about. I noticed very early in my study of it, in the 70s, that ALL systems emerge by growing whole working energy systems. Growth is not studied much in science though, as science can find no good rules for it, one reason we weren’t warned about the need to use common sense when running planet much earlier.

I also noticed is that successful growth is an organizational process, that build the way a system works. Part of that is always for a system, as if reading the internal and external signals of its development’s success, and responding as a whole. We do that all the time, naturally, gauging the signals we respond to for “how we doing” and then acting accordingly. They’re mostly non-verbal and discovered and not taught. So, where do we learn that. It seems to be part of the job of life, to be actively learning and inquiring about life.

It’s a kind of very primitive but successful survival instinct, sometimes working great, and … totally missing at other times. The economy is doing both, beautifully, it’s survival instinct for sustaining growth is working fabulously, trained by people fixated on limitless growth,, taking the initiative to fill every gap they can to make the global growth curves as smooth as possible. That it’s destroying humanity’s hope for the future too, doesn’t stop it from very miraculously and and creatively multiplying its now fatal design.

World growth factors, once thought to be the “pluses” and the “minus.”

______________________________________________

Some will say “gee when do I get mine, if we stop growth now” even knowing it’s needed to save the planet. They’re overlooking that SUCCESSFUL GROWTH INVARIABLY HAS A SECOND PHASE. One may call it “maturation,” “growing up,” “care taking,” “preparation” or other terms, but i’s about every new system needing to change plans to have time find how to really work. We do that with our personal lives, and find growing up not unpleasant at all, if cared for of course. We also make that switch from forming the new system (in relative isolation) to making it really work (in context). Literally every successful project and effort we make has that design change in the middle.

So… a good place to focus one’s work is to learn to recognize nature’s signals for when to turn, from innovating to coordinating, for example

Gee, I should have saved the draft and I don’t have time to redo the two or three concluding pp’s that were lost somehow, never happened before, either. But… What can I say, make it up as you go ! ;-)

_______________________________________

JLH

A Plan to Change Plans

Nature’s path for thriving new lives starts with a long burst of extractive growth, but then changes to become self-healing. Our economic growth started that way all growth processes do, but then we overdid it, a fatal pattern advanced human economies since the late Bronze Age, that has now become a mortal threat to us. So we did PART 1, and have now avoided PART 2 of the natural self-healing process till there may be close to no chance to fit it in before our societies collapse as the late Bronze Age and Roman ones did. We urgently need that stage of repurposing the growth resources to maturing and healing our new way of life to make it fit for living in peace and in harmony with our unfamiliar new environment.

Linked below is a talk given to the Bioregional Regeneration Summit by Jessie Henshaw on her natural systems design science on the opportunities for growth system transformation… something a little like birth actually… Self-healing growth systems reach their lasting climaxes by responding to their resources first used to multiply their scale to instead be used for healing what grew into its new world. As new lives, they change from growing to caring for themselves and learning about surviving the their new world and making their new place in it .

Our global economy’s problem is that we imagined exponential growth, we knew the math, could be perpetual. We didn’t know the experience would slap us with so many existential catastrophes all at once. That appears to be the big surprise the economies that discovered how to sustain growth before ours also faced, and failed to respond to. Now most of our ‘sustainability efforts’ are for delaying the change to self-healing growth, causing ever growing harm and waste of resources we’d use for much better purposes once we study how narture’s growth systems, as well as many that we more personally manage, take her and our systems to a peak of perfection in design, vitality, and longevity; caring for each other and our world, to enjoy what nature prepared for us, despite our earlier and continuing missteps….

Fall of 2022
Bioregional Regeneration Summit – Register Here (free) 
Tuesday, Nov 1 – 11 AM EDT Login and go to the MAIN ROOM
The talk is in the Forest Room (at the top Left of the Main Room)

 Recording of the Talk:
the Natural Growth Path – a plan to change plans

In nature… the MIDPOINT TURN at the end of growth toward real life very often works quite smoothly, with the new life being of ONE DESIGN and fabric, having grown from A WHOLE INSPIRATION of some kind and remaining whole as it grows. As a result, it is also able to make a whole respond with its internal connections to signals from the environment of when and how to turn.

We follow the very same plan with whatever we create and care for to last. A – Start something, then B – make it work. Humanity has not yet turned to making the world work, our next big job, while carrying on with our lives too.

The most normally successful rule of new system growth is “create things to care for,” whether by nature or people. What gets it going is some small way of accessing energy and resources for accessing more. It’s an emergent “expanding spiral” process that, for people, we’d often call an “in-spir-ation” or, in nature, a “germ-in-ation”. Many other names, like “startup,” refer to it too.

As what is growing is a system organized to build with captured resources, it is more of a “find & connect” process than a “cause and effect” process. Of course, there are cascades of cause and effect, but they’re mostly organizational breakdown processes (entropic), not organizational build-up processes (syntropic). Mainly studying cause and effect ideas seems to be why physics did not find how to do advanced growth studies, despite the name first meaning “the productivity of nature” in Greek and then changing in use.

As a practical matter, one can often observe the little burst of energy with which growth starts or see some remnant of it. That aspect is fairly universal, whether for how new relationships start or projects at work. The same kind of inspired startup begins the work on a home, a new community change, organizations, and even making dinner and gardening. The success comes from following the burst of creation with a more careful process of coordinated care for the new design and fitting it, at its new scale, to its new world.

____________________________

– Another text version – Nature tells us how and when to turn
– All my links and research – Reading Nature’s Signals

JLH

Also part of the path of discovery of where our cultures came from and the foundation we still need to learn from:
The apparent Bronze Age roles of Hestia and Hermes

In terms of the ancient Greek history of our split consciousness marked by the emergence of modern science, between family order and societal order, I’m suggesting the one could come to the rescue of the other. The foundations of close-knit family and group life are still strong and seem to be, in turn, the foundations of all human societies too. So they’d be a healthy source of unified environmental rules that might communicate with societal institutions, and teach them how to see, by feeling their effects on their environments, reviving their instincts of wellness and survival. In Greek terms, it would be home life created in the early Aegean hearth home, the “Oikos” coming to the rescue of the “Polus.”

__________________________________________

An opening came from distinguished Lehman College home science professor Pat Thompson. She found a way to reconstruct revisionist histories from what they disparage and what they are replacing, exposing the enduring Aegean Bronze Age culture,

One of the great turning points was the dawn of Greek science, with Thales, the first modern scientist, an Ionian trader who showed how to use math to make a fortune, set the new model. The idea of nature controlled by abstract rules of concepts and rules of control flourished and floundered again and again ever after.

At the same time, the new science culture proudly banished the earlier 2500 yr Aegean science of hearth and home, that our own family lives as centers with connection come from, associated with Hestia and Hermes, the first and only humble Greek gods.

The research leading to this came from Pat Thompson’s discovery of how to reconstruct revisionist histories and retracing the highly distinctive archeology of the Bronze Age Aegean hearth-home’s need for columns, leading to Greek architecture!

As a postscript — the problem with the great “centers with connections” of modern societies, commerce, and business is their losing touch with their contexts due to modeling decisions not on the common good like families do, but on abstract principles for ever-growing control of their contexts, human and natural. With the centers of power hoarding the profits of the societies being built, distributing enough to keep the peace but with no interest in distributing enough to care for our societies or the natural world all depended on, our ways of life were blinded to what became the “mysterious externalities” of global destruction directly caused by seeking limitless power! Who would have known? How did that get so confused?

________________________________________

More on the research is in my old notes on the Hestia connection called Hestia’s New World.

from a conversation on FB group Global Challenges Collaboration
link to FB post

No we shouldn’t condemn humankind for being out of control

Sam Hahn  April 23 at 11:05am

We must not condemn man because his inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature are exploited for false and destructive purposes. – Albert Einstein

Jessie Henshaw

 Sam, No we shouldn’t condemn humankind for being out of control, not even for betraying ourselves in failing to study it carefully. It’s sort of “over the top,” in all dimensions. What most matters may be just moving people to recognize that we truly need to gain some control of our future, that we have a future worth protecting, that if we study we can discover the error.

I’ve noticed a curiously deep problem with our remarkable talent for conceptual thinking.  Our great talent for recognizing patterns of control also comes with great ignorance of what we’re trying to control, as nature’s designs are actually beyond our understanding. So we regularly fail to see how our efforts to control things cause disruptions too, also leaving us relatively helpless in trying to heal them as well.  That our minds so often falsely label our opportunities this way is a serious handicap, making it dangerous to rush into what seem to be our greatest doors to success.  Recognizing that hazard is a useful pattern though, one I think you can see reflected in the great disaster prone themes of our culture, which seem associated with the bias of seeing the world through rules for control enabled by our talent for conceptual thinking.

There’s also a glowing opportunity to study it that people seem to shy away from, by looking closely at the natural creative processes by which things begin, the growth periods that bring about the transformation of natural systems in our everyday experience. How visible they are has been hidden from us, by how our whole society became organized around thinking about patterns of control, creating an economy using them to multiplying our control of anything profitable. Perhaps the most consequential problem with that way of life is just not having any second act.

Nature and our own experience are full of creative second acts for growth systems. Finding a second act for our economy is also rather necessary for our survival.  It would also go a long way to absolving us of our feelings of helplessness and guilt about it. That nature is full of second acts for growth, of course, means there are innumerable examples of natural systems that began much like our fateful world economy behaves.

From the view of a fertilized cell in the womb, the world seems like a limitless resource at first, as it multiplies furiously,

From the view of a fertilized cell in the womb, the world seems like a limitless resource at first, as it multiplies furiously, going from one cell to a trillion in the nine months. That is the work of a systematic process of a growing system taking ever greater control of its environment.  It has a surprise ending, though, that despite all the pain and danger involved often turns out magically well. That all successful lives seem to begin this general way, with a limited but highly creative burst of self-organization, followed by a period of developing successful roles in the world, is the general pattern, of successful growth in nature having a first and second act.

Our world economy seems to have gone through its great burst of self-organization, its first act.  It remains designed to multiply ever further its control of human and natural resources, though. I see that as a clear symptom of our blindness for what could come next. That’s where the close study of nature’s way of creating second acts, transforming initial growth processes into final ones to create new forms of life, could help.

Where it would start is with subjects we know very intimately, such as how good personal relationships begin. New relationships seem to always start with a period of contagious development.  If they’re to succeed that spontaneous wave of new connection is also graceful enough to hesitate, as it enters unfamiliar territory. That relaxation of the contagion permits a change from fitting together bigger and bigger changes in the relationship to fitting together smaller details at a finer level of attention.  It’s a way to bring the design to completion by making it whole. So in short, for the world economy, we need a “relaxation of the contagion” to allow it to turn toward becoming whole, permitting our second act of growth.

That same kind of succession seems present in the origins of other things, as part of a universal story of “how things begin.” The turning point in the middle often involves a crisis, but is often as smooth as can be too. Either way it involves a new way of thinking, from beginning to completing a grand design, having the potential for a wonderful outcome if the emerging life is both careful enough and perhaps lucky.

a way to bring the design to completion by making it whole

__________________

JLH

I’m pleased to announce long work now completed….

Apr 10 2018 a Springer journal, Systems Practice and Action Research, published:

Systems Thinking for Systems Making: Joining systems of thought and action
J L Henshaw  [Springer PDF here or Author’s here]

An exploration of what appears to be a new dimension and understanding of systems thinking; the stepwise learning and improvisation that evolves our thinking in the individual and collaborative processes of discovering how to make and do things in nature.  The paper provides an overview covering basics, some history, and advanced subjects.

A review of the new systems sciences that developed since 1940 displays both tremendously creative effort to better understand reality and some current stumbling blocks.  Variations on older tried and true techniques, like using models to help us study nature rather than represent nature, are suggested as perhaps pointing to a productive path forward.

Jessie Lydia Henshaw

Citation:
Henshaw, J. L. (2018). Systems Thinking for Systems Making: Joining Systems of Thought and Action. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11213-018-9450-2
pub 4/10/2018