Deep biotic immersion is the experience of fully participating in the physical dynamisms of our living planet: or, more simply, it’s a spirit-rebooting experience of being alive.
We are always “one with nature”; yet the ways we have been taught to perceive, value and engage with nature produce an imaginary division between us and it.
Historically, this division finds expression in theology as the worship of supernatural deities (i.e., gods who are “over and outside of nature”), in human relations as patriarchy and racism, in economics as “jobs versus the environment,” in science as the mechanistic versus the organic perspectives, and in psychology as the dualism of mind and body. Biocitizen offers courses that feature deep biotic immersion because the experience brings health to our students.
There is no need to list the ways that the ideas we have been taught have yielded illness to us and the creatures we live amongst; our ubiquitous brownfield cities tell us that what our ancestors built—the USA—is not is not working out according to plan, or is even being maintained, because its design does not harmonize with nature.
Our ancestors’ adoption of the system of knowledge generated by industrial capitalism conflicts with nature, and has produced our global warming and extinction crises. These crises have fundamentally undermined the liberal social compacts that Modernism offered our ancestors, such as democracy and “the American Dream.” Human productions that conflict with the physical dynamisms of our living planet are ultimately unmaintainable, and we have reached that ultimate moment of reckoning when such productions fall apart and we have to construct our world anew.
Deep biotic immersion is an actual psychosomatic experience, not just another “cultural construct,” that brings us into direct contact, and lets us participate immediately, with the physical dynamisms of our living planet; and, by making us fully aware of the original forces which (have) generate(d all) civilization(s), it provides an epistemological and psychological grounding that cannot be undermined. For, how can water, and our consanguinity with it, be undermined?
Once the student becomes comfortable with the experience of deep biotic immersion, they have the basis upon which they can de-construct their unhealthy industrial capitalist identity, and re-construct themselves as biocitizens: as citizens of bios—life, not (only) of nations. This reconstruction is realized when the imaginary divisions between humanity and nature vanish, and deep biotic immersion is understood and valued as the constant state of reality.
Deep biotic immersion—aquatically, terrestrially, solarly and atmospherically engendered—is a full-body thought-feeling of union. The word health comes from whole, and what is whole is united. Awareness of one’s unity with the bios brings health—and that it why Biocitizen offers courses that feature deep biotic immersion.
