"Organic Intelligence" has been coined by Steven Hoskinson. Part of its
roots are in Somatic Experiencing from Peter Levine. Soma means body.
I used the best term I thought about in relationship with
permaculture, and also because we can instinctively understand what it means. When we discover a bit more of the biology and physiology of ourselves, animals and plants, we deeply know that there is more intelligence there than only in our "I think, so I am"!
We cannot deny that we can see around that non organic chemistry is less efficient than organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is all that contains
carbon atoms and forms organisms. LIFE. Carbon organizes life structures and specific-to-species fractal forms that multiply, grow, extend, repeat themselves.
Permaculture is more than about organic agriculture, because it sees the necessity of design, which for me means organisation, or even upstream organisation. Not only our thinking brain is not the only organising master, but it is also part of our physiological/organic body. Some brilliants minds concluded that we have to use this mind to tend creation as other living beings do, and that we have to take care that our brilliant mind can also go too far into some organisations that in the end start to disorganize the biology on earth.
If we speak of intelligence, we mostly think of "reason", though we can see now that plants develop a form of intelligence that is not a brain form of intelligence. Talking about animals that have a brain, then we considere intelligence mostly according to the size of the neo-cortex. But what can we think of an intelligence that is not able to see that it is loosing something when it gets seemingly more? What can we think of an intelligence that is replacing instead of adding? And is this intelligence the one that is running all life? Obviously not.
Science already brings us with
enough answers to considere, if we can use this cortical intelligence to considere that there was some intelligence before we developped this one. We know we have a tri-une brain but since before we know this, history has made us despise part of our humanity and focus on what makes us different to other species. Now we can also considere that we have an organic intelligence that is not only the CNS - Central Nervous System - because aside the cortex, we have the limbic brain and the ANS - Autonomic Nervous System - and this one is the more ancient.
Each older part of the NS is still preemptive upon the next part, which means that energy goes to the ANS, limbic and cortex in this order. Who has noticed they cannot think as good when they are either tired or fighting a disease with fever, or triggered by some urgency? Who has noticed that they have said or done things they regret, when their anger goes down? (or somebody else, if you don't) What is less easy to notice is that when we use our powerful cortex to repress other needs or some "steam coming out of our pressure cooker", we are stocking up in our biology. Our society/culture has build some wonders, but has replaced some "needed needs" instead of adding the new advantages to the old ones. We could make a list of what we dropped instead of keeping it...
I have to make short cuts because this is a post, and because more informations is available elsewhere.
Do we take care of the people so well ? In a way yes, but we could do better for sure. We already talk in this forum about taking care of our food production and of the necessity to keep eco-systems for the future. Taking care of our Organic Intelligence directly, would be the theme here. What can we do in order to regulate our regulating system? How can we use our reason for making better choices here? This ANS is autonomic, which means that the cortex does not have a real direct influence upon it, though we can decide to do certain things that will allow the ANS to do its job better. Synchronicity, regulation, self-regulation, resilience, so that all our other body systems that depend upon the better health of the "chief of the orchestra" can work better.
The result is that we can get more energy for action if we regulate our emotions, that are themselves regulated by the ANS and our physiology. (of course there are also feedback loops that hide the order of importance of the 3 parts of the NS). What makes a difference for our physiology is the sense of danger or security. According to this security scale, our ANS works differently. And as the ANS is in charge of our life, it will automatically direct our energy to the alert system about what's wrong! It is needed, but not all the time. Animals in nature might live in more danger than us in a way, but they are also getting more clear clues about when they are in danger, and when they are secure. Also because we can
project more into the future, we can be more triggered by danger than what is a clear present danger.
Many people have become quite sensitive, so that they can detect danger earlier. Many people have also suffered from threat and violence from beings of their own species: Compared to animals, we do not suffer that much from other species. So we miss what they often do not: support from contact, which is precisely a big part of what our biology had developped in order to let the needed time to our ANS to recover after an acute episode of threat. Instead of time and understanding, we are often told to hurry up and not take time from others! How much contempt we have for sheep for example! But the main thing they do is to be physically close, because herd species rely on this more than other resources and abilities, to recover and be able to go on living. They can focus again on eating and living until the next threat. Isolate them, and their ANS cannot do its job. Our ANS is also in difficulties when we have to recover alone. We are a tribe species. And we are also a dancing and singing species because creating a rythm together is helping us to connect and not hurt each other. Instead, we often have to walk among unkown persons and have to act as if we were among friends. We make tribe through the World Wild Web (I leave my initial typing mistake on purpose!), but the way we have to find jobs make us live so often out of not only our tribe but our close familly.
Sensitivity has a lot to do with being alert and even hyper-vigilant, and it is nergy taxing. It can seem strange to stay sensitive even during the moments of better safety, and actually it seems as if the system tells "us" "Why would I go down if I have to go up so soon again? I decide to stay up there, or go down very little, so that I will have less effort to do to go up again." We really need to feel secure enough and to go down to a resting enough state. Being secure is not enough, we need to FEEL secure, in our body, in our biology. If we have lived too long in a relative lack of security, we can even have a less good immune system, because it was not alloted the right amount of energy. No enough was available. So you might result in a slower metabolism for
saving energy reasons, or you might have issues with tiny aggressors like virus or fungi or food toxins etc. then you are in a circle that is more difficult to escape from. Do not worry though, your system is making its best and has adapted for your benefit.
Now where are the solutions that are in the problem?
Remember that your ANS is also your life guard and that is thus more prone to focus on "what's wrong" than what's good? When we ARE safe though we do not FEEL safe, we might not even notice all this because our culture has never taught us to pay attention to the ANS signs. We even learn that the ANS has only to do with organ functions and "instincts" and has to be controlled, instead of having
freedom to do its job. We can actually practise to notice what's good. Ask anybody "How do you feel, in your body?" (meaning not about emotions, you see, we have only 1 words for those 2 meanings!) and they will
answer with a pain or a tention here and there in their body. Ask anybody to ay attention to their posture or their breath, and they will modify it! The good news is that we can also practise to pay attention to our physiology without changing it. Then we can also notice that it can change on its own, and that it happens alone, without control.
This is close to an
art actually. It needs conscious practise before it can happen fluently, a bit like playing music. In some culture they still all know how to sing and dance, and they probably still have more practise than us about feeling the body so that it can do its self-regulation and settle down to a real resting state. All in life has wave shapes, especially what touches our senses, like light and sounds. Our nervous system and our cells are also electric in nature, with all those minerals that are either - or + and that creates movement, life. We live according to a circadian rythm and a seasonal rythm too. We love surfing or just watching waves, or creating waves with a stome we throw in
water, watching the circles expand. What our real nature wants is to expand too! We feel pain as circles going towards us and our energy is contracting. All we want is to expand again and feel our joy as circles in the water.
The best way our intellligence can help, is by deciding to not take the role of the other parts of the brain but to communicate wisely. Our cortex speaks in thoughts and words, our limbic brain's language is emotion, but our earliest mother tongue is the felt-sense. It communicates through sensations and maps the world around us, allowing our organic life to move inside us, allowing our behaviours to happen too. Both science and practise brings us enough knowledge to bridge the gap of all that we have not paid enough attention to. It is there and it has always been and is still taking care of us even when we do not know it.
We can make its job easier, and we can also repair ourselves when we have suffered more than we could repair until now. We will not loose any of the abilities that we developped thanks to be sensitive! Those abilities are real gifts and we keep them.
If you already have found the ability to control and manage any unpleasant nervous state, you can still learn something else, which is how to let this happen without the effort /tips/tactics that you have found, so that it gets easier and save your precious energy for something else!
You can list techniques that have the ANS and the soma at their roots. There are already more than one, and though most of the ones we have access to are more or less 20 or 30 years old, they usually match many traditional ancient techniques. For cultural reasons, we have not often managed well to use ancient techniques, but when you know that they all address the regulation of the ANS, then you can more easily use them with steeady success.
Apart from Organic Intelligence and Somatic Experiencing, you can also look at Somatic Practice and ISP.
Bodywork methods like Feldenkrais and Rolfing and biodynamic cranio-sacral are also very much taking the ANS into account. I have not investigated them that much but I have noticed other techniques that take the ANS into account, like the Nemechek protocol for SIBO, or Hanna Somatics.
And without mentionning it specifically, I am sure that a lot of permies already had noticed a lot of this through their contact with nature and especially animals, but also plants now, through awareness about soil webs. All beings, all life, have evolved from the same roots and is expanding from a similar basis, though trunks and branches have separated into many twigs, leaves, spines, flowers... and primed us with all this beauty around, that we can look at better every day, for our enjoyment and our feeling to be part of the mystery of creation. Our ANS is what best in us talks the same language as the nature we can admire around us.
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