Transcript

0:01

CYPRIEN CLERC: Hi martin.

0:02

MARTIN WINIECKI: Hi.

0:03

CYPRIEN CLERC: So we’re here in Tamera in South Portugal and it’s a very special place. Can you please describe Tamera to us tell us a little bit about you?

0:25

MARTIN WINIECKI: Tamera is a peace research and education center. The project has been going for 40 years and it’s a research project on the question of how can we create conditions for a nonviolent and regenerative culture. So Tamera is a social and ecological experiment, if you will. And we are trying to create, in a way a blueprint for a non-violent culture that can model a possible future culture. And I have been part of this project for 12 years; I arrived as a teenager and was a student here. And now I am leading the Institute for global peace work, which is our communications, and networking department.

1:18

CYPRIEN CLERC: Wow, what a job.

1:22

CYPRIEN CLERC: What are the main activities, actions or projects you do within the community?

1:29

MARTIN WINIECKI: With that goal of creating this blueprint for nonviolent culture, which we call a healing biotope, there are three main threads of how we doing that. The first one is actually research and modeling that kind of type of society ourselves. So we are researching; in ecology, in technology, and community building, in love schools, we’re also communication with animals, we have a Children’s Center. So we are trying to kind of model the basic areas of life in accordance to a culture that fosters trust and cooperation and really reimagine life. The second thread is education. W are running programs for an increasing number of people and projects in the world, want to create similar types of communities to model a different society.

2:32

CYPRIEN CLERC: Can you tell me what are the actions and projects of Tamera outside the community?

2:40

MARTIN WINIECKI: One is the Defendant Sacred Alliance. So this is a program or network rather that we have been facilitating since 2017, it really was strongly inspired by the movement of indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, that drew in many, many people from many different camps and ideologies, and cultures unified in their stand for the water for the earth. So we are trying to bring together leaders of different movements and to create a kind of incubator for a more sacred activism, if you will. Another thing is that we are running online education. We are also intending to create more of an online platform also for people that want to connect deeper and learn from Tamera and the division of healing biotopes. And another one is a program we call the global campus, which is support for communities, especially in the global south, that have been building communities with this intention of modeling regenerative autonomy, inner transformation, trust building. So communities that are already quite far developed in terms of creating healing biotopes, and so this is a program to support them in their community building questions, but also with knowledge about ecological restoration, clean energy technologies, and these kinds of things.

4:37

CYPRIEN CLERC: Tamera is far from being a bubble; you are very connected to the outer world.

4:43

MARTIN WINIECKI: Yeah, increasingly, I would say.

4:52

CYPRIEN CLERC: Could you say quickly what you found out about? What are the main lessons you’ve learned, during all those years about the human being as an individual, what do we actually long for, what makes us happy? What makes us feel safe or fulfilled? And also as a group, what do we really want and need from relationships and community?

5:19

MARTIN WINIECKI: Okay, I would say the first thing is that, when you engage in this kind of radical experimentation in community building, in different forms of coexistence, you see that actually many of the myths about human nature that we have of been internalizing in this dominant culture, that they are simply not right. Violence is not necessarily to keep order in society, war is not necessarily to resolve conflict, jealousy and fear is not necessarily, you know, in relationships, it’s not necessary to destroy some kind of being of nature and demean it as a pest. You kind of venture into a different matrix of life, you see how malleable people are, to the social structure that they live in. So I mean, this is a very Marxist idea, you know, it’s the social being that determines consciousness. And in a way, it’s very true if you live in a society that is oriented towards competition, use value, productivity, then on the social side, and the consciousness side, you develop competition, fear, you actually you live in very contracted and disconnected, alienated way of life. But if you create conditions, that are oriented towards cooperation, towards trust, towards actually unfolding, and finding back the meaning for which we are here in life, you see that people develop very different forms of behavior. So people, when they have the possibility to show themselves truthfully to one another, and to see the other and to see themselves in the mirror of the other, they develop the intrinsic wish to support one another, even in places where from a normal point of view, we would think this is absolutely impossible. So for example, two people who love the same person, usually this is where everything breaks, but actually, if those people are part of a trusting community, they can, they will support each other. So in a way, I think the biggest discovery of Tamera was that there is a different structure of reality that we can discover when we no longer follow the, yeah, the remzees of this crazy culture. But we actually follow the question of what is, why are we here as humanity? What is the dream that wants to unfold through us? We discover a different matrix of life; we call it the sacred matrix. And it’s also not just limited to human beings, I mean, you cannot find meaning for humanity if you take humanity out of the context of the community of life that we are part of, I mean, in a way, this is also a big myth, this idea that, you know, the human being is the Lord of creation, the world was created for us. So this whole idea, the anthropocentric idea puts us in a very alienated bubble. But when we reconnect with the community of life, in a way also pickup an indigenous original knowledge, which says that, actually we are here to steward the community of life, all living beings, our relatives, our brothers and sisters, then you actually see that humanity can only find its meaning in the mirror of that community, because we are an organ, we are in a way the earth becoming aware of itself. But we will only find, we will only see that in a true sense, not in a dominating sense, when we again allow for these insights that comes through empathy that opens in connection with this community of life.

10:42

CYPRIEN CLERC: What do you think is the key to start changing the paradigm, you know, to just start going into a different direction?

10:50

MARTIN WINIECKI: Whether it’s climate breakdown, or whether it’s fascist resurgence, or whether it’s also the rise in addiction and suicide rates. I think all these phenomena are not separated from one another. It’s not like different crises intersecting somehow, but it’s different symptoms of the one and same fundamental root cause. And that is a civilization that is in contradiction to the very principles of thriving life. Our civilization has been built around an ideal and around memes you could say, cultural values that have led to a global system that is really centered around destroying life in the most systematic and insidious way possible. I mean, how is it possible that that we are accepting and that we are thinking that a system that is really based on the ravaging of our natural home is the only one that’s realistic? David Attenborough said this beautiful sentence: if you believe in infinite growth on a finite planet, then either you’re a madman or an economist, but this is like, you know, this is where we are and I think it is important to know that in every culture shares a certain set of stories, a certain set of values, that bring people together in a shared space in which they can interact. So, if you want to change the trajectory that we are on we have to take the underlying stories of the culture that we are living in and really reimagine the fundamentals. What is a story? A story is an archetypal scenario you could say which defines the relation between people, human culture and nature, between human culture and a transcendental realm or whatever you want to call it, and also very importantly, it defines the relation between masculine and feminine, it defines how it relates to Eros. If you look into each culture, those are the key places that make a culture either cruel or humane. And so this is, those are the places where we where we can flip the switch into a non violent or thriving regenerative direction. Because it is in those areas that we have been really fostering an attitude of separation and fear. Whereas actually, when you think about love and sexuality, for example, we treat it now as a commodity as it’s filled with fear with competition, but actually, if you think about it, this is the core realm of human desire, which is just, I mean, it is driven by this huge longing for unification, for transcendence, but as a culture, we can only get there and only stop this huge compensation of frustrated longing and anger, if we have a consciousness and a societal structure which allows this longing to actually get anywhere. So we need social structures, and we need cultural stories, where, for example, love and sexuality are no longer pitched against, the idea of final judgment. They believe that in the end love will result in disaster, you know, Eros will end in bloodshed. Those are still the mind that we are conditioned by, but we can transform them if we start to see the possibility of what a trust-based culture can look like. I mean love and sexuality don’t stand alone, though, it’s also important to understand, I’m not propagating like a collective relationship therapy or something. But Eros is a vital life for us. Which when we really open it consciously and in the space of trust, we realize that this is not confined to just my body and my emotions and then maybe connects to another person but it’s this life current which also connects me with animals, with plants with the whole living world not in the sense of sex, but in the sense of the capacity to develop empathy for another being. It is an essential quality, which interconnects essential perceptiveness, which interconnects this world because it is a bodily world. You know, our sensuality is what we share with all living beings. But if the sensuality is denied, you create a world where we inflict pain and violence in the physical realm, instead of celebrating the scent, the joy that this sensuality could be. So if we change the erotic, our relationship to Eros, we will automatically change our relation to animals, there will not be slaughter houses in an erotically liberated world, we change our relation to water, we will no longer put it into straight canals, which leads to floods and all of this, but we will allow water to flow freely. Whatever we do to the outer is always a reflection of what is happening inside ourselves, it cannot be different. And whatever we can see in terms of a liberated world relies on how much we can free ourselves from the constraints of this kind of competition and fear based society.

17:42

CYPRIEN CLERC: Let’s get into the technological questions; some very interesting stuff is happening at the moment with the rise of artificial intelligence. And it is said that 40 to 50% of people are going to lose their jobs in developed country in the next 5 to 10 years. And I have two questions regarding that. One is what do you think us Human should do with our time, if we managed to free a lot of our time because of the use of robots? And the other one is, from your perspective, what makes you human unique? What can a human do that a robot cannot do?

18:36

MARTIN WINIECKI: I think it’s actually a very interesting threshold that we are at. And I think, I think it’s quite likely actually, that artificial intelligence will replace quite some of the labor force that we’re having in place now. And I think it’s actually a really great opportunity to kind of free people from working like machines. But making humans more human, however, that really, it really depends on what kind of societal structure we live in. I mean, the more dystopian the societal order becomes, the more “the dystopian” will be the answer to the question. I’m sure that the ruling elites are thinking of how to get rid of all those deplorables. And at the same time imagine that half the people are not busy with just thinking the whole time in terms of how do I work my job? How do I survive economically? I mean, it could be a moment of huge creative liberation, where people can actually ask the question, what do I want to do with my life? What is my unique contribution to this world? People could engage in art and culture and creativity and building community, I mean, there would be a lot to be done in terms of unfolding our own genius, when we no longer in a way compete with machines and kind of water down our consciousness, our brain and our sensitivity, as we are doing now, you know. But that really depends on what kind of social and cultural movement there will be to confront this dystopian outlook that we are having now in many regards with a real emancipatory positive outlook into the future. And this is also what we’re trying to do with the healing biotope project: to show this different possibility. So maybe first to say that I think that whole digital revolution is actually a precursor to a spiritual revolution. I think that the whole development of the digital revolution seems to have almost no end, even though I think it has an end. But this vast round of possibility that they discovered, in terms of how virtual reality can design and transform physical reality in terms of its massive communication networks in terms of artificial intelligence, I think all of these wouldn’t be possible, if it wasn’t based on some deeper base reality in a way which would make this kind of technological development even possible. So there’s something in the nature of the mind and the nature of the spiritual structure of reality, if you will, where manifestation from imagination, where instantaneous telepathic communication, and the increase of intelligence through interconnecting single beings, where this is part of an evolutionary stream. So in a way, I think, technology is much more part of organic life than we might often see. We have the possibility to cooperate with that current of evolution. But it will also be really important for human consciousness, to not only be amazed by all this possibility of technology that arises, but actually develop in that spiritual direction, as well. Alan Watts put out this sentence where he said: technology is only harmful to the degree that it is not developed from a space of unity. And if you see how much digital technology can unify the world, but at the same time, it deepens the fragmentation, you see why a spiritual revolution is necessary to handle the digital revolution responsibly and meaningfully. So this leads me to answer your question. I think, in a way, robots can do a lot more than we think they could do. And at the same time, I think there is something about the quality of our consciousness which, I think, a lot of we are still fully exploring; what is really unique about it, which you cannot make, you cannot codify reflective consciousness, the perceptiveness of the soul and central perceptiveness into a robot. I think machines can be extremely intelligent and imitate communication, a lot of human features, but there is something where, the moment when people fall in love, because they have seen something in the soul of the other, I think a machine, a robot will never be able to come to this point, because this is when the depth of one divine spark meets the depth of another one and with all our, you know, grandiose idea of who we are as human beings, we are not able to play God in the way that we could codify that thing, because with all our technical intelligence, we are not even closely conscious of what that moment actually is. So we need to develop so much more spiritually, to understand what is this special moment of consciousness that allows this transcendence, in order to even come close to this question of what makes us different from a machine; and I think the enthusiasm of people in Silicon Valley of the singularity movement where they think that of course we will reach the point soon where AI will overtake the world, they think in this way because they see the world as a machine, there is a whole part of a more feminine existence, which doesn’t just doesn’t exist in the brain of these boys. I mean, and I find it really interesting that we have climate disruption, that we have the mess, the six mass species extinction at the same time, as you know, the explosion of digital technology and one is the half life of inspiration of men, the primate, this civilization driven by man’s technical genius, and on the other side, you have the living world crying in despair, as a result of exactly that development. And at some point, also the digital revolution will be shown its borders, in terms of the material world that we’re living in. And so, I think, those sides really have to come together.

27:41

CYPRIEN CLERC: There’s a lot of talk happening around virtual reality and augmented reality.

27:47

MARTIN WINIECKI: I mean, it’s very interesting, I see it also as a result of like a certain leap of consciousness that happened in the last century in terms of like, what is really base reality and the whole digital revolution, which then leads to virtual realities and all of these, it wouldn’t have been possible without the discoveries of quantum physics in terms of the projective nature of reality. Actually we are discovering that everything that we see isn’t even very solid in the so-called real world and the end is also just a virtual reality. So, we have to be aware of that and I think that what is playing out now with virtual reality is humanity almost as an infant entering the realm of very big insights but with the state of consciousness humanity is living in right now, it will blow out our minds. It will just further the fragmentation, the alienation, the disconnect. Psychological diseases, big time. Like on a psychedelic experience, you can just travel through all these hallucinations and you can get lost in them. But, if you are centered in an even deeper place, which is outside the projections, the hallucinations, the different images of virtual reality, the Self, that which you are, that which you are eternally, then you are able to not identify with virtual realities you see, you can kind of venture through to the point of truth.

30:12

CYPRIEN CLERC: Yeah, like the form doesn’t matter as much.

30:17

MARTIN WINIECKI: Well, the form? I don’t think that people will indulge in the virtual realities, just as people get lost on trips and hallucinations. I think it’s actually almost one and the same thing. When you have lost this inner anchor in the self, the conscious orientation of a certain form of self-reflection and a sense of intention, where you’re heading in your life. And I think until people come back to this point of consciousness or even develop the necessity to come to this place again, of course, you will see the disintegration of everything because it has to disintegrate, because the culture that we come from has forced patterns of life on us, which cannot be kept up anymore. They were directed against life and they are coming down now. We live in a time of big entropy on all levels, spiritual and ecological and social, political, economic, it will all fall apart. The question is, is there another unifying principle which is no longer “domination fear constraint”, but which really corresponds to the inherent, like an aid longing for true unification, for unity in diversity. You know, this is the question, otherwise, , virtual reality, digital revolution, all of this it will just blow out our minds until we have no idea anymore, who we are, what we are. But the problem is not virtual reality. The problem is the lustiness, if you will, of humanity. And yes, we need spiritual schools, we need centers where people can reconnect to that which is uniquely human, that which is consciousness, that which is the source of love and creates conditions for trust, then we can use all the, you know… we are entering a new era and with unprecedented possibilities of technology of consciousness, but in order to use them properly, we need the social foundation of consciousness, foundation that allows for meaning for trust for actually building love among people. Otherwise, we can talk about technology forever, and it’s it will just end up destructively.

33:22

CYPRIEN CLERC: I really like that last answer.

33:24

MARTIN WINIECKI: Yeah.

33:25

CYPRIEN CLERC: And on that note, thank you so much.