Previously, Week 10
Welcome to Week 11 of Art of Becoming.
Today is the fifth of this seven-part contemplative series on sustainability.
In this fifth offering of our seven-part contemplation on sustainability, we arrive at a crossroads where the abstract becomes actionable. Thus far, we’ve traced how language transmutes into lived experience, and we’ve recognized care as a complex sensibility that guides one's relationship to life. Perhaps, we even begin to see our selves as a consequence of more-than-individual acts rooted in those subterranean currents of shared meaning, the way a forest’s roots silently weave collective memory into soil. We’ve wandered with Hans Jonas through the existential imperative that to live is to bear a debt to life itself—a duty older than ethics, etched into the marrow of being. We’ve walked the sandy contours of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, where science and reverence intertwine to reimagine our kinship with soil, water, and sky.
Today, we pivot from the why to the how. If sustainability is the art of sustaining—not merely enduring, but flourishing in dynamic reciprocity—then systems thinking is its brushstroke. Technology is so often cast as antagonist in narratives of ecological rupture, but here we consider technology not so much as tool or trespasser, but as a mirror. It reflects the depth of our attention, the quality of our presence, and the invisible lattice of collective consciousness that binds keystrokes to typhoons, code to glaciers. Just as a lute’s strings, tuned neither too taut nor too slack, teaches us that beauty arrives through balance—so too might we view technology as an instrument, harmonizing human intention with the rhythms of emergence.
Today, Tara Brach’s wise effort meets Christoph Becker’s call to transcend the myth of rational systems in a practice that invites us to also consider technology not as artifact but as verb. To design technological systems sustainably is to recognize that every algorithm and digital interface pulses within a web of interdependence—a feedback loop echoing the unseen patterns of collective memory, where the ghosts of past decisions hum in server farms and the aspirations of future generations flicker in lines of code. The Buddhist parable of the lute finds its echo in modern systems—the tension between control and surrender, between human agency and the autopoiesis of structures larger than ourselves.
As you read, consider this: What if sustainability is not a problem to solve, but a practice to inhabit? A tuning of the irreducible mind as much as the machine, where each act of design becomes a votive gesture to the collective psyche? Practices yet to come in this series will delve into culture’s role as both scaffold and sculptor of consciousness, but today, we stand at the threshold of applied wisdom. Here, systems thinking becomes liturgy—a way of seeing that transforms servers into ecosystems, user interfaces into rituals, and sustainability into the daily act of listening to the world’s resonance, as one might attend to the half-remembered dreams of a species.
Prepare, then, to reorient. The path ahead is neither utopian nor dystopian, but alive with the messy, sacred work of becoming ancestors worth inheriting—architects of systems that honor not just the living, but the whispers of all who have shaped, and been shaped by, the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to endure.
Setting the myth of rational decisions aside and recognizing the importance of situated, embodied decision-making in design opens up a space for better understanding the facets and effects of psychological distance in systems design. Once we stop thinking of people as flawed computers, our thinking about design is liberated. Instead of focusing on nudging users through manipulative framings or minimizing their ability to commit errors, we may begin by considering how our system can expand their horizon of experience; how it can amplify their wisdom and judgment; how it can empower their reasoning. This profoundly changes how we understand and counteract short-sighted or narrow-minded design decisions and support just and sustainable decisions.
-Christoph Becker, Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability
In the dance between human ingenuity and planetary limits, we confront a paradox as ancient as the first tool: every stride toward efficiency births new appetites, every solution sows the seeds of unforeseen consequences. Consider the humble lightbulb—a triumph of illumination that promised to conquer darkness, yet in its thousandfold efficiency gains, birthed a world ablaze with artificial stars, their collective hunger for electrons dwarfing the dim glow of gas lamps they replaced. This rebound effect, observed in railways and highways and now in the digital realm, reveals a fundamental truth—optimizing fragments often amplifies the whole. Like river currents redirected by dams only to carve new channels, our technological fixes course through the ecosystem of human desire, reshaping landscapes in ways no algorithm can contain. A cryptocurrency miner’s calculus lays bare this tension: sharpen the blade of energy efficiency, and the harvest grows richer, drawing more reapers to the field. What begins as a quest to trim waste becomes an arms race of consumption, a modern echo of Icarus’ flight where each waxen feather of innovation lifts us closer to a scorching reality. Yet within this paradox lies a revelation borrowed from nature’s playbook—the recognition that resilience emerges not from isolated optimizations but from the dynamic equilibrium of interconnected systems. The spiderweb’s strength lies not in any single thread but in the reciprocity of tensions, each strand’s give-and-take sustaining the whole.
And the spider teaches us something about ourselves: we are born point-line-field composers in a Kandinskian cosmos. Its web begins not with instruction, but through a primal point— a drop of ancestral techne etched into its being—that tacit knowledge that Michael Polanyi recalled as ”more than we can tell.” Each strand of this kind of web arcs outward in dialogic tension with wind, leaf, and light. Our hands, too, carry an unspoken fluency for reciprocity and can trace invisible architectures. The flint knapper’s strike, the potter’s coil, the coder’s keystroke—each a point generating lines of force across temporal planes. For millennia, these lines have conversed with watersheds and mycelial networks, composing fugues of reciprocity now buried beneath Cartesian grids. Somatic wisdom is woven into the very web of cognition itself, and so, it persists as palimpsest: the dendritic spread of root systems, the synaptic web of human thought—all variations on Kandinsky’s Ursprung of form.
So, our practice towards this ancient techne asks that we shift from what Erich Fromm calls the “having mode” to focus not so much on acquiring new knowledge, but instead to a lineage of lines—where every algorithm becomes a brushstroke in a wet landscape. Life itself knows that myopia is an ongoing error code for acts of isolation that register server farms and typhoons as discordant vectors. True techne listens for the harmonic intervals between silicon and soil with capacitive touch. This is the work of techne reimagined—not dominion over nature but dialogue with it, where every line of code becomes a stanza in an epic poem of interdependence.
The environmental fallacy, that siren song of narrow vision and primary colors — bold, simplistic, deaf to nuance — tempts us to mistake fragments for wholes. But the limits of nature—that ultimate systems problem—mocks our solipsistic palettes. It asks not for greener gadgets but for a fundamental reorientation: to see technology not as a scalpel carving progress from raw matter but as a loom weaving humanity back into the web of life. Between logic and intuition, between the measurable and the sacred, we find the fertile ground where sustainable systems take root—not through force or resignation, but through the artful balance of a lute’s strings, tuned to resonate with the rhythms of a living world. The loom of wise design weaves not with threads but tensions—pull too taut, the warp snaps; too slack, the weft tangles.
The myth of progress often paints technology as a parade of artifacts—swifter machines, sleeker apps, greener widgets—but this is a kind of magical thinking, mistaking the shadow for the substance. Technology is not a cabinet of curiosities but a living language, a syntax of relationships between mind and matter, intention and consequence. It arises from how we choreograph attention, elevate certain values above others, and digest the invisible aftermath of our choices—the way a forest grows from the interplay of root and rain, mycelium and decay. Just as Buddhist practice cultivates sati—the art of attending to the ephemeral dance of thought and sensation—sustainable design demands a vigilance for the hidden filaments binding server farms to melting glaciers, lithium mines to touchscreen swipes. To reduce technology to inert tools is to fragment the world into solvable puzzles, optimizing for efficiency while eroding coherence, chasing innovation at the cost of reverence. Consider the old alchemy of Jevons’ paradox: each leap in solar panel efficiency begets a hunger for more consumption; each fuel-sipping engine invites longer journeys. These are not flaws of engineering but failures of vision—the myopia of isolating “problems” from the living tapestry of cause and effect. The rationalist creed, with its liturgy of data and fear of ambiguity, is akin to a composer fixated on sheet music while deaf to the acoustics of the concert hall. Yet wisdom—as illuminated by Vervaeke’s “cognitive ecology”—thrives in the liminal space where logic and intuition converse. Relevance realization, that act of discerning what matters, is not a brute-force algorithm but a somatic waltz between body, context, and meaning. Should we choose to design systems worthy of our tangled world, we might then exchange the hubris of solutions for the grace of reciprocity—to tend the garden rather than engineer the harvest.
A developer crafting blockchain protocols might perfect cryptographic precision, yet the energy appetite of proof-of-work mechanisms reverberates into melting ice caps and exploited labor chains. This is not a plea to discard innovation but to expand the horizon of accountability. Tara Brach’s “virtuous cycle” begins with an intuition—a spark of possibility that ignites action aligned with that vision. Sustainable technology must emerge not from detached calculation but from an embodied kinship with futures we cannot yet map but feel compelled to steward. Like the lute’s resonance, which depends as much on the instrument’s hollow chamber as its taut strings, meaningful innovation thrives in the interplay of visible code and invisible connections—where algorithmic logic meets the breath of ecosystems and the pulse of equity.
The Buddha’s 60,000 teachings, each tailored to the texture of individual suffering, unveil a truth: liberation defies uniformity. Modern computing’s insolvency—its failure to reconcile its debts to marginalized communities and dying biomes—stems from a monoculture that mistakes rationality for wisdom. Christoph Becker’s call to “reorient” systems design invites a mosaic of knowing: relinquishing the illusion of control to embrace adaptability, symbiosis, and the cultivation of collective insight. This is biohacking at civilizational scale—optimizing not for exponential growth but for resilience, recognizing that a system’s vitality blooms not in stability but in its capacity to metabolize disruption, much like a forest thrives through periodic fire.
In the forge of ancient techne, craft was never a solo conquest but a dialogue—the blacksmith’s hammer conversing with ore’s resistance, the potter’s hands shaping clay in rhythm with earth’s memory. These artisans understood tools as extensions of reciprocity, where form emerged from the dance between human intent and material agency. Modern systems design, by contrast, often unfolds in sterile abstraction: decisions rendered in glass towers ripple into Indigenous lands and oceanic currents, their consequences fragmented across epochs and ecosystems. A coder’s keystroke in Palo Alto amplifies drought in the Sahel; a data center’s hum accelerates permafrost thaw. This fragmentation is not inevitable—it is the offspring of a worldview that idolizes efficiency over equilibrium, mistaking control for coherence. To design sustainably is to rewild our imagination, seeing servers as mycelial networks and algorithms as living dialogues between the present and the unborn.
So, as we harmonize technology with new ways of knowing sustainability, we will reject the hubris of universal solutions. Just as a geodesic dome derives strength from the dynamic balance of tension and compression, sustainable systems thrive when designed to amplify local agency and adapt to shifting thresholds. Intention aligns not through force but through attunement. This is Tara Brach’s “virtuous cycle” that imagines algorithms that can evolve like mycelial networks, their logic branching in response to soil conditions; user interfaces that function as rituals, inviting pause and reflection rather than compulsive engagement; databases modeled as ecosystems, where data integrity is maintained through mutualistic relationships rather than rigid hierarchies. Practice today calls us to reanimate our tools with the ethos of techne—to see technology not as a noun but as a verb, a continuous act of co-creation with the living world.
And yet, the silent hum of servers and the quietude of a meditative mind share more than a superficial resemblance. Both demand a vigilance that is neither rigid nor passive—a poised attention that listens as deeply as it acts. Our great challenge today is not so much to build “better” tools but to become better listeners—to reawaken that architect in us who recognizse that every line of code etches itself into the lithosphere of future memory. Presence becomes an ethical stance: active participation in the feedback loops that bind keystrokes to coral bleaching, supply chains to soil depletion. It is the acknowledgment that our systems are not neutral conduits but living narratives, each algorithm a stanza in an epic poem composed collectively across generations.
Yet this vision is neither a retreat to preindustrial nostalgia nor a surrender to Luddite despair. It is a clear-eyed reckoning with power’s invisible architectures—the algorithms that equate growth with vitality, the platforms that confuse connectivity with community. The acid rain of our era—microplastics swirling in oceanic gyres, biased models calcifying inequality, e-waste leaching into ancestral lands—stems from a failure to heed techne’s core lesson: technique divorced from ethical reciprocity becomes extraction. Christoph Becker’s imperative to reorient computing away from problemism invites us to replace the blunt instrument of “solutions” with the nuanced craft of tuning—a lifelong apprenticeship to balance, where sustainability is not an endpoint but a practice.
To design for just sustainabilities is to approach each system as a symphony in progress, its harmonies emerging from the interplay of dissonance and resonance. We are both composers and audience, our tools tuning forks that vibrate with the frequencies of interdependence. The lute’s strings, the blockchain’s ledger, the wetland’s microbiome—all demand the same disciplined receptivity. In this reframing, every decision becomes a stitch in the living fabric of a world we are perpetually relearning to inhabit, each act of creation a pledge to those who will inherit the melody.
Alchemy of Wise Effort in Spiritual Life
A Dharma Talk by Tara Brach
Wise effort means that we are wholeheartedly engaged with what matters to us. Wholeheartedly engaged. And it also means we are wholeheartedly engaged and yet we are completely receptive and open. There is not a straining or a leading forward. So engaged, yet open.
Meditation Practice
Today’s Instruction: Return to the unadorned suchness of this moment
Settle into a posture of alert simplicity—back straight, gaze soft, attention resting with the rhythm of breath. Notice the mind’s tendency to conflate form with understanding. When you find yourself drawn to symbolic gestures—a particular seated pose, an altar, a mantra recited by rote—pause. Investigate: Is this ritual a vessel for presence, or a costume obscuring the raw immediacy of experience?
Observe the impulse to adorn practice with borrowed significance. Each time you reach for ceremonial trappings, ask: Does this deepen clarity, or merely decorate the surface of a mind still avoiding its own unmetamorphosed depths?
Return to the unadorned suchness of this moment—the rise and fall of the chest, the play of sensation, the silence beneath thought. Let every strategy, every gesture, every concept of “spiritual progress” dissolve into the fire of bare attention. What remains when the robes of belief fall away?
Rest there—not in the performance of insight, but in the undecorated reality that precedes all compensation.
