My friend Xiq has made a diagram that has made a very significant impact on me:
We had a whole podcast conversation where he explained this diagram to me, section by section, node by node.
Xiq’s diagram is quite complicated and intricate, and it felt overwhelming for me at first. Still, I felt quite drawn to it. I liked Xiq, enjoyed talking to him, and believed in him—wanted to understand better how he thought about things.
I also intuited that he was onto something. The claim that there were connections and relationships between e.g. meditation and personal knowledge management and x-risk mitigation was particularly novel and compelling to me. I wanted to learn about that.
It took me a while to understand Xiq’s diagram, but putting in that effort has been so useful and valuable. It has shaped my thinking about how a number of different themes connect; about this moment in history; and it has helped me to make sense of the future—to prepare for seasons and chapters that have yet to come.
In this post, I want to translate Xiq’s diagram, which is framed in his terms and views, and is also primarily visual, into my own words, into language that makes more intuitive sense to me. Rather than producing a diagram, this post will also be a written document, in sentence and paragraph form.
I am writing this post partly to explain it to myself, to internalize it more deeply for my own use and edification—but also in hopes that this post might make Xiq’s diagram and thinking more approachable to others—that it might benefit more beings, more deeply (have maximum deep benefit).
on “human flourishing in deep time”
Xiq’s diagram is aimed at explaining how a number of different ideas, modalities, and problems connect, with a view towards bringing about what he calls “human flourishing in deep time.”
This ideal of Xiq’s points to something similar to what some of my friends call a “golden age,” or what we at The Service Guild might call the heavenly realm. These frames are perhaps more pithy, resonant, inspiring. I think Xiq’s framing is an especially useful counterpart, because it looks at the aspect of time, and also scale.
I resonate with the phrase “human flourishing,” but also bristle a little bit at what I see as its speciesism. Xiq says we could just as easily call it “multiscale alignment.”
I might say “maximum deep benefit”—helping as many beings as possible, as deeply as possible, in as many dimensions as possible—or “world flourishing” or “universal blessings” or “deep flourishing at all scales, for all beings, across time, across realms.”
Scales
One of the most valuable things I learned from Xiq, and this diagram, is about scale. Xiq very helpfully distinguishes between nine different scales:
- Self / Attention
- Body-emotion
- 1-on-1
- Squad-family
- Congregation
- City / Scene / Network State
- Bioregion
- Global
- Post-Human
Xiq has some valuable notes and reflections these scales and their connections here.
I might word or frame or disambiguate these scales differently, as follows:
- Parts
- Self
- Dyads / 1-on-1
- Crews / Squads / Family
- Congregation
- Scene
- Village
- City
- State
- Bioregion
- Nation
- Global
- Galactic
- Intergalactic / Universal
- All Beings, All Realms
Still, U take the point. There are different scales, from within oneself, to the largest scale imaginable. This observation rhymes with Tyler Alterman’s Fractal Altruism, or Malcolm Ocean’s Non-Naive Trust Dance, or Rich Bartlett’s Microsolidarity.
This insight has shown me many things:
- Some people or disciplines are especially interested in or concerned with questions and problems at specific scales, e.g. the nation state level (global politics and diplomacy), or simply within oneself (spirituality, psychotherapy, etc.)
- Many modalities, practices, traditions, domains are exclusively interested in one or two of these scales. For example, IFS is especially interested in parts within a single person.
- Some frameworks consider many of these scales, but forgets or ignores others.
- Considering which scale we are focusing on, discussing, solving problems at is very helpful.
- The same questions, problems, and solutions recur at every scale, across contexts.
- Lessons and best practices at one scale will (probably) cross-apply well to other scales. For example, the theory and practice of IFS likely applies not only to literal family systems (the therapy modality which inspired Richard Schwartz in the first place) but international diplomacy and trade.
- Principles and practices that work at one scale will (likely) work at other scales, with other complex systems, if appropriately understood, framed, transformed.
Clusters
Xiq’s diagram splits naturally into a number of clusters:
- Spiritual Practice: self-care, somatic, and spiritual practices reduce suffering, lead to better qualia, higher levels of integration, emotional intelligence, and better relationships
- Bottom-Up Sensemaking: individuals perceive the world and distill knowledge from their experiences and perceptions. “to make significant high-level decisions for the benefit of people, information needs to propagate up through layers of abstraction – this information is gathered through direct experience of qualia and is distorted up the hierarchy, we can minimize these distortions via clear sensing and proper aggregation”
- Language Stewardship: “etymology enchants the world”; “etymology matters and good language use means you can get information across more precisely”
- Collective Sensemaking: what Xiq calls “figuring out the truth together, figuring out what to do together”; or, the “process of synthesizing information from single heads into a shared corpus such that joint action be derived from it”
- Dunbar-scale coordination: “We lived atomized in our flats; sometimes we have families, sometimes we have friend groups, and then we vote at internet / national level- no in-between”
- Multi-scale organization: “entities embed in one another, people aggregate and relate with superorganisms at different levels of abstraction”: families, clubs, companies, cities, countries, etc.
- Global Coordination: “we need planet-scale coordination to manage our public goods and common-pool resources, including X-risk”
- Human Flourishing in Deep Time: we could become a multi-planet species; to do so, we will have to avoid existential risks
Each of these clusters has associated concepts, references, problems/questions, solutions, existing entities.
Some of these clusters are already very interesting to me, resonant for me (spiritual practice, bottom-up sense-making). Others are less familiar or interesting to me, but if they are important to Xiq, they are important to me also.
Conclusion
Xiq’s diagram implies that it would behoove us to think carefully about the connections between topics and fields that might otherwise seem to be quite distinct or unrelated, like personal knowledge management and the arrival of new religions and churches, or internal psychological or spiritual practices and local-first software.
Seemingly disparate fields are actually connected—insights or progress in one domain, at one scale, can be mutually supportive of progress or deepening in other domains.
Another implication of this diagram and Xiq’s thinking that is especially alive for me right now is that all of the internal psychology work I’ve done cross-applies to other people and my interactions between them.
For example, internal family systems and external family systems are functionally isomorphic; what works well at resolving inner conflict demonstrably resolves external conflict. I get excited at the implication that this theoretically applies at even larger scales also, e.g. Ukraine/Russia or Israel/Palestine or human/Earth but that it’s a skill, scale issue that prevents us from resolving those conflicts at this time.
More broadly: whatever I learned here cross applies there; whatever U learn in one context can be useful in other contexts and scales, also; the same moves that apply here at this scale apply at that scale also.
In order to solve the problems we are facing, in order to gracefully navigate the challenges and opportunities that we face, in order to steer towards positive futures for ourselves and all beings, we will need to think creatively, to make unexpected connections between seemingly disparate fields or contexts. This is true not only for our global, species-level problems, but also for our own internal well-being, in the local communities that we care about.
And we need to think across time—not only about our exact place or moment in time, but across eras, centuries, planets.
May all beings flourish! May all beings in all realms, at all times, be well! May all beings be happy!
Thank U to Xiq for inspiring this post, and for reviewing it and providing feedback!