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