― Democritus

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”

― Henry Melvill

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

― Viktor E. Frankl

“I don’t think that there is a single word in any language that can describe what life is, but if I had to choose one, I would choose the word “paradox”. Wherever we look at it, we see that life is a paradox.”

― Alonso del Río

Subscribe now

ACT ONE: Kokura’s Luck

30 October 1926. Mr and Mrs H. L. Stimson arrive at Kyoto Station and proceed to the Miyako Hotel, where they are given room number 56. They spend six days enjoying this historic city, which had been the imperial capital of Japan for almost 1,000 years. In 1868, the capital had moved to Tokyo. It was autumn, and they could enjoy the gardens surrounding the former imperial palace. The colours of the Japanese maples turned crimson, and the ginkgo trees burst into a golden shade of yellow.

16 June 2004. I arrived at Kyoto Station by train from Tokyo. It’s a month-long trip. Atsusi’s flat in Tokyo is serving as my base for my various trips around Japan. I headed to the backpackers’ hostel I’d booked, a room with about 10 bunk beds. For three days, I visited the Imperial Palace and some of the iconic sites in the surrounding area, such as Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavilion), Kiyomizu-dera (the mountain temple) and the thousands of red torii gates at Fushimi Inari-taisha. I also spent a day in nearby Nara, where the deer approach you and bow in the hope that you’ll feed them. It’s a learned behaviour that pays off. These were hot days heralding the arrival of summer, and a few days later in Tokyo, I would be treated to a natural phenomenon in the form of a typhoon.

10 May 1945. It has been three days since the Nazis surrendered in Germany, and the focus of the world war has shifted to the Pacific: Japan. At a remote outpost in New Mexico, scientists and military personnel are working on a new weapon of unimaginable destruction, which they have named the Gadget. The first explosion of this prototype in a nearby desert is scheduled for 16 July; it is the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test.

Thirteen men make up the Target Committee and are debating which city to destroy. They believe Tokyo is not a good idea; it had already been devastated by heavy bombing. They decide it will be Kyoto, as that place is home to new wartime factories producing up to 400 aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, it is a symbolic location, the former capital, which could undermine Japanese morale. Additionally, Kyoto is also an intellectual hub centred on Kyoto University. The committee assumes that those who survive will admit defeat and that the bomb will herald a new era. The committee decides that Kyoto must be destroyed. They present President Truman with a list featuring this target and three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura.

6 June 2004. We left Yoshie’s parents’ house in the countryside of the Yamaguchi area and headed for Hiroshima. The house is surrounded by rice paddies, with koi carp swimming around. Two hours later, we arrived in Hiroshima. It looked like a modern city. We pull into a car park, and Atsushi parks the car in a sort of robotic lift. We get out, and the car is driven to an empty space on one of the upper floors of the car park. Japanese technology strikes me again in my more analogue culture. A few days earlier, I’d noticed people watching videos on their mobile phones in the underground, and I’d also experienced the magic and warmth of Japanese toilets.

We left the car park and wandered through the city until we saw the highly recognisable, symbolic, and much-photographed Genbaku Dome. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a symbol of hope and world peace. The Peace Memorial Museum is located very close by. We went inside, and I can’t remember if Atsushi and Yoshie had visited it before; for me, of course, it was my first time. Each of us picked up a set of headphones to follow the museum tour. Mine were in Spanish. The sound of the alarms, the voices, the images, all that horror seeped into my body. We left the museum in complete silence.

July 1945: Mr H. (Henry) L. Stimson, the American tourist who had visited Kyoto 19 years earlier with his wife, was now the Secretary of War, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. As a man without a uniform, he did not intend to micromanage the generals. However, when he saw that Kyoto had been designated for destruction, he changed his approach, as that city touched his heart. He insisted to the generals, despite all their logic, that there was one city they must not bomb without his permission: Kyoto. In those final days of July, Stimson visited President Truman twice to oppose the destruction of Kyoto. Finally, Truman relented. The final list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and, as a late addition, Nagasaki. On 6 August 1945, the Enola Gay did not head for Kyoto but for Hiroshima. The bomb, called ‘Little Boy’, dropped on Hiroshima killed more than 140,000 people, most of them civilians.

7 June 2004. This is the last of the three days we’ll be spending in that part of Yamaguchi. I could have spent those three days in Seoul, visiting a mutual Korean friend with Atsushi, but our plans had changed. Whilst planning that trip to Japan, Atsushi, who had accumulated a lot of air miles through his work as a sales representative for a Japanese company, had suggested we visit Korea and meet our friend Jim during a long weekend. I was delighted at the prospect of experiencing two new cultures. However, shortly before I arrived, plans changed, and we would be visiting the Yamaguchi area, where our mutual friend, Yoshie, was staying with her parents in a rural place. I found this quite amusing because it turns out that my city in Spain, Pamplona, is twinned with Yamaguchi (The Kyoto of the West), and I had heard that name hundreds of times because of its connection to the city where I lived. We have a large park called Yamaguchi, parts of which were designed by Japanese gardeners. Saint Francis Xavier, one of the co-founders of the Jesuits and a native of Navarre, had been on a mission in Yamaguchi five centuries earlier, hence the ties that led to this twinning in 1980.

That day we visited some caves and then went to a viewpoint where we could see Japan’s third-largest island, Kyushu. Yamaguchi, like Tokyo and Kyoto, is on the island of Honshu, the largest and most populous. Nagasaki and Kokura are on the island of Kyushu. I didn’t visit either of them, but I could see Kokura very clearly from that viewpoint.

9 August 1945. Bockscar, a Boeing B-29 bomber, set off for Kokura carrying the Fat Man bomb. The meteorologists had forecast clear skies, but the pilots encountered heavy cloud cover. They circled for a while, hoping the clouds would clear, but as they did not want to risk a botched drop, they headed for Nagasaki. That city, too, was shrouded in clouds. They were running out of fuel and made another pass, and at that very last moment, the clouds parted. Fat Man fell at 11.02 am on Nagasaki, killing 80,000 civilians. The inhabitants of Kokura, thanks to the meteorological ‘fate’ of those clouds, were spared. The Japanese expression ‘Kokura’s Luck’ was born on 9 August 1945.

*Don’t miss Act Three, but first, Act Two, a short but also very important act (everything is connected)

ACT TWO: Amor Fati

“On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.”

This is how the second part of the introduction to Brian Klaas’s book, ‘Fluke: Chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters”, begins. It is one of the most spectacular introductions I have ever read in a book. Just this year, 2026, the introduction to the book ‘Maintenance: Of Everything’ by Stewart Brand (confounder of the Long Now Foundation) left me in awe and will very likely feature in another article. Klaas is also the author of the dated “points” that I have summarised in Act One that are not in italics. They belong to the first part of the introduction to his book.

You might wonder how that paragraph from this second act connects with the first; I won’t beat about the bush as I did in the first act, and Klaas will clear up this conundrum for you with this other paragraph from his book:

“The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.

When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.”

Amor fati is a Latin phrase that can be translated as ‘love of fate’ or ‘love of one’s fate’. It is used to describe an attitude in which one views everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. It is also associated with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche. I can also find this idea in the Dao de Jing and in Viktor Frankl’s book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which recounts his experiences in a concentration camp during the Second World War.

We began Act One with a factor we very rarely consider: luck, and how ‘God’ plays dice, even though Einstein didn’t believe it. His colleague in physics, Niels Bohr, told him, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” and later, more wittily, Stephen Hawking said, “Not only does God play dice, but… he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”

In Act Two, there is a sort of ‘paradox’ similar to that in the film ‘Sliding Doors’, where Helen Quilley (a London woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow), whilst descending the underground steps, a simple gesture, or lack thereof, from a mother climbing the stairs with her daughter, causes Helen to catch that train or miss it. It is the Borgian ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ where one of the many branches of your future continues whilst the others are severed forever. Brian Klaas’ aphorism and key message of his book says: “WE CONTROL NOTHING, BUT INFLUENCE EVERYTHING.”

Finally, in Act Three, will we resolve this conundrum, or not? (My Shakespearian question and soliloquy)

ACT THREE: Ever-Living Fire

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

― Hannah Arendt

“Living the questions together is an effective way of preparing for an unpredictable future”

― Daniel Christian Wahl

“Hundreds of thousands of years ago, by the fire, a hominid leans over another who is dying. It is someone very close to them, and they feel compassion. Their gazes lock until the gaze of the dying figure blurs and that of the survivor softens. Then the survivor turns towards the starry night and, for the first time in the entire course of evolution, a fragment of matter questions itself. Shortly afterwards, a funeral rite takes place. It is the first sign of self-awareness. Perhaps it was a Homo neanderthalensis, perhaps a Homo antecessor, but whoever they were, at that very moment that individual realised that he or she, too, would die. Since then, the question has never ceased to hang over all that is human: what is the meaning of existence? Faced with this concern, there are at least two options. A very common one is to accept a cosmic plan served up as a complete package in which everything is predetermined. We never stop thinking about death, but by this route, the reflection is soon dismissed. Another alternative is to assume that life is a game of chance that is well worth playing. By this other route, the reflection never ceases to begin anew.”

― Jorge Wagensberg

Any day after 17 May 2026. You are reading the conclusion of this three-part article, which is a follow-up to my first introductory article on Substack, ‘What is reality?: The elephant in the room’. From this second article onwards, I invite you to gather round the fire. There is probably nothing older, or at least as archetypically human, as a starry night with a tribe or a group of people gathered around a fire… and to do what? You might ask. Well, let’s apply that ‘compass of the nine human needs’ I introduced in ‘What is reality?’

I can sense that not just one but several needs, in a spirit of multifunctionality or synergy, are present in that space & time, to be satisfied with energy (fire). In the end, it all depends on the context and the group involved, which sheds light on what they were doing.

Drawing on my anthropological expertise (whilst bearing in mind that I am a product of a Western worldview and culture), I venture to map out certain ways in which those human needs might be met within that circular ‘fire’ or ‘compass’, for example:

• Maintenance: Food, drinks...

• Protection: Warmth, warding off predators...

• Love: Connection, conviviality...

• Understanding: Storytelling, knowledge...

• Participation: Agency within the tribe...

• Recreation: Dance, Music...

• Creation: Inspirational ideas and possibilities that emerge...

• Meaning: Existentiality, spirituality...

• ...finally Synergy, which encompasses them all and, in its circular form, connects again with Maintenance.

Now that we are all seated and gathered around this fire to try to connect some dots in these three acts, let’s begin with a little of my life story and with the small acts or words that, as Hannah Arendt suggested, shaped the constellation of my journey. The subtitle of the article, which states that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, taken from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, converges with those four quotes that have made my ‘Arrival’ here. With that play on words of this space and time (past-present-future), I also should mention the science fiction novelist Ted Chiang, who wrote ‘The Story of Your Life’, which was later the movie ‘The Arrival’. In it, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist, tries to learn the nonlinear language of the alien Heptapods, which shifts her perception, allowing her to experience her entire life at once. The final part of Act Three will consist of a series of questions designed to make us reflect on our life story, and, if you’d like, share anything with us in the glow of this bonfire (or in the comments). This would be fascinating, helping us make more connections in the uncertain, unpredictable future ahead.

Let’s continue with the story of my life and those four quotes. On my journey through life as a teenager, I developed a passion for collecting quotes, brief messages that held seeds of knowledge and wisdom. Amongst them all, there are always favourites, and now, looking back (Steve Jobs’ speech connecting the dots), I can say with certainty that those four quotes are key to the story of my life, the limits of my language, and my world. They are the North, East, South and West of my map/territory.

The first of those four that left a mark on me was Viktor Frankl’s:

I read his famous book ‘Man’s search for meaning’ as a late teenager. It was thanks to the good fortune of coming across an exhibition in Pamplona in the late 1980s, entitled ‘Around the World in 80 Books’. Imagine that they stated the first book of that list was Viktor Frankl’s, so I needed no further ‘nudge’ to seek it out. The surprise, or ‘coincidence’, I’ve come across whilst writing this article is that that quote wasn’t in that book. And, secondly, even more surprisingly, nobody found the exact origin of the quote, although the spirit of its message was certainly present in his philosophy. According to the Viktor Frankl Institute, the quote appears verbatim in Stephen Covey’s books, which I also read in the 1990s. Coincidentally, due to his influence, one of Covey’s books, ‘First Things First’, with its four L’s: Live, Love, Learning, and Leave a Legacy, also follows the pattern of the four hands: ‘The Vital Hand’, ‘The Solidarity Hand’, ‘The Responsible Hand, and ‘The Conscious Hand’. However, the construction of those four quadrants, and subsequently the four hands, is more closely determined by the four quadrants (Existence, Co-existence, Achievement and Perfection) that contain the nine human needs outlined by the nuclear physicist and polymath Carlos Mallmann in his framework in 1973. If there is divergence in evolution, there is also convergence, as seems to be the case here.

The second significant quote that planted a seed in my journey was Democritus’

I came across it whilst reading a reference about the book ‘Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology’ by the biologist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod. By chance, the book had been published in the Metatemas collection by Editorial Tusquets in Spain, and the editor of that collection was none other than Jorge Wagensberg. He is another physicist and polymath who, in recent years, has greatly altered my perception of ‘reality’ and will feature frequently in these conversations around the fire.

For more than 15 years, ever since I first came across it in early 2000, that third quote has been stuck in my head:

Until a few months ago, I believed that quote was by the famous novelist Herman Melville, and that is how it is usually attributed online. However, it seems the likely source is a famous Anglican preacher, Henry Melvill, who, coincidentally, lived during the same period as Melville. A kind of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. From this, we could learn two lessons about ‘reality’. Firstly, the one that highlights how everything is connected and how systems thinking seeks to define a slice of ‘reality’ to gain knowledge. It is impossible, as we saw in my first article, to encompass all of reality, the whole territory; we can only draw maps. Secondly, on how that reality, or that map of ‘reality’, is constructed. When many explorers agree on it, reality begins to take shape. Many people have repeated that this quote may be by Herman Melville, and it seems to have stuck. The internet is full of quotes attributed to Albert Einstein, and many of them he never even said. What a paradoxical reality!

Finally, the last quote by the Peruvian artist Alonso del Río stuck in my mind in 2018, and I still haven’t been able to shake it off because I didn’t come across a fifth quote on my journey that made me see the world in a different light.

As you may have noticed at the end of the paragraph of the third quote, I can’t help but view the world through the lens of paradoxes. This story is a little longer and contains several relevant twists to bring this final to a close in a full circle.

In 2018, whilst I was writing ‘The paradox of wellbeing; when ill-being helps us along our way” and searching for quotes on paradoxes, I suddenly came across it (in Spanish) and it has left me perplexed ever since. Likewise, through that world of paradoxes, I came across a saying we have probably all heard: ‘Less is More’. And that very thread led me to the board game ‘Less is Max’ (probably the best educational game in the world for the wellbeing of society and the planet). The name of this game is playing with the Spanish words ‘Menos es Más’ (Less is More). It referred both to the sense of sufficiency hidden within that saying, and to the nine human needs proposed by Manfred Max-Neef in the 1980s. Whether by chance or necessity, Max-Neef’s nine needs, far more famous than those of Carlos Mallman, were ‘inspired’ by the latter’s.

Between 1975 and 1976, Carlos Mallmann, as president of the Bariloche Foundation, was lobbying to promote the book ‘Catastrophe or New Society?’ and came across Manfred Max-Neef. This Chilean was a potential figurehead for the Latin American world who could assist the cause, and Mallmann introduced him to the Bariloche Foundation. The Bariloche Foundation became famous in the 1970s for its role in the Latin American World Model mathematical project. This was a challenge that had begun a few years earlier, when Latin American scientists, including Mallmann or some from the Bariloche Foundation, met in Brazil in 1971 to hear a proposal from a group of MIT scientists presenting the results of their World3 mathematical project. A year later, in 1972, the book ‘The Limits to Growth’ by those scientists shook the world with some rather bleak predictions for the future if they did not change course.

‘The Limits to Growth’ identified three possible trajectories as observed from the North:

• Business as Usual (collapse)

• Comprehensive Technology (delayed collapse/extension)

• Stabilised World (sustainability)

On the other hand, the Latin American project assumed, from a Southern perspective, that collapse was already underway in their countries, because from the North, through colonialism and extractivism in the South, they were depleting the material resources that sustained them. The Southern project was not to leave possible trajectories to chance or to the market, but to politically activate a path towards sustainability. That path focused primarily on basic human needs, with special emphasis on participation (bottom-up) and less on a more prescriptive (top-down) approach.

Coincidentally, those two books, in their original editions with the colours of their covers, resembled the most paradoxical symbol of all, the yin/yang. Whilst ‘The Limits to Growth’ was more beige than green and the title was on the top, ‘Catastrophe or New Society?’ was more green than beige and the title was on the bottom.

A perfect pairing that brings this paradox or complementarity full circle with the transformation of Democritus’s quote into a question. Is everything that moves the world the result of chance (including the market) and necessity (including human needs)?

Here are the final questions that arise at the end of this play, and which, as I mentioned, you can answer for yourself and also share in the comments.

On your journey as an explorer through this life, and now that you find yourself reading this article…

• Have you ever wondered how chance brought you here?

• What does that chance depend on, or what is it made of? Is it the meeting of your parents, their parents and other generations, or more specifically, that single sperm that won the race against the half a million that didn’t cross the finish line, or maybe a book, quotation, or a word that was planted in your mind?

• Or perhaps the question I’ve posed to you depends on Klaas’s great-grandfather, who made it possible for him to be born, for me to read his book, and then to write this article this way?

• Or does it depend on Stimson’s trip to Kyoto, and on the fact that my Japanese friends were born because one of their great-grandparents were from Kyoto or Kokura and not from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and that I subsequently met them during my stay in New Zealand in 1999, so that they could later invite me to Japan and I could see ‘Hiroshima’ through eyes that were either happier or sadder, depending on a chain of previous events?

Welcome to the world of paradoxes, to the world where everything is connected and disconnected at the same time (or Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead), to the world of Democritus (The Laughing Philosopher) or the world of Heraclitus (The Weeping Philosopher), who says some words of the title of this Act Three:

“The world is an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures.”

Klaas, in his book ‘Fluke’, told us:

“The central metaphor of the story is that humans are wandering through a garden in which the paths available to us are constantly shifting. We can survey the future and see infinite possible worlds, but in any given moment we must nonetheless decide where to take our next step. When we do, the possible paths before us change, forking endlessly, opening up new possible futures and closing others down. Every step is important. But the most astonishing revelation is that our paths are not determined solely by us. Instead, the garden we live in has grown and been tended by everything and everyone that came before us. The paths open to us are the offshoots of past histories, paved by the past steps others have taken. More disorienting still, it is not just our steps that matter because the paths through our garden are also being constantly moved by the decisions of living people that we will neither see nor meet.”

Many more questions may arise in this ever-burning fire that maintains us (but also consumes us), that can give us both meaning and understanding, that protect us with stories and its warmth, that allows us to enjoy a drink or two whilst the light shines in the eyes of our loved ones… in short, that allows us to create and participate in the journey, game and theatre of life, sometimes in a wild way and at other times in a synergetic way. However, between those questions and our answers lies a space. In that space is our power to choose our responses. In our responses lies the synergy that maintains the flame always alive.

Share

Subscribe now

My last Monthly Newsletter has plenty of meaningful insights and possibilities for synergy.

Moving towards the Humanities and the Arts

“The explorer is not the expedition”

“The compass is not the direction”

“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

Welcome to this Substack adventure I’ve called ‘The explorer is not the expedition’. With that title, I’m probably giving away the answer to the question: “What is reality?”, which heads the title of this first article. Furthermore, to put another clue on the ‘table’ of this adventure, let’s take a third element, ‘the elephant in the room’, and play with all three.

This triangular approach will be one of the hallmarks of this blog. If there is one message I’d like to highlight, it is this: triangulation as a method for navigating reality and life. Well, it’s not 100% certain, nor probably 90% or 80%… yet it may be a basic rule of thumb that saves time and serves as a guide or reference in the face of the complexity we encounter in life. The map will never be the territory; when the map and the territory coincide, as the writer José Luis Borges told us in his short story, could we call it reality?

As is often explained, the expression ‘an elephant in the room’ is a metaphor that can refer to a truth that is ignored or goes unnoticed, or to a problem or risk that nobody wants to discuss.

Paradoxically, it could also be both. The best way to illustrate this is through a story, because stories, since the dawn of time, have been, for better or worse, a source that has given us fragments of truth (and falsehood) and, consequently, perhaps fragments of ‘reality’ (and ‘unreality’) depending on the intention or good faith of the storytellers and the listeners’ interpretation.

This is a parable you may be familiar with: that of the elephant and the six blind people. Through this parable, which originates from India, we are shown how a limited experience of reality leads to erroneous conclusions. There are many ways to tell it, and various versions have circulated since ancient times.

Let us say we come across a group of blind people who have heard of a strange animal, which they call an elephant, and which has been brought to their village. None of them is aware of its shape or form. It is then, out of curiosity, that they decide to examine it by touch. So, the story continues with the six blind people touching different parts of the elephant: tusk, trunk, ear, leg, back, tail… Subsequently, they begin to describe it according to their individual perception of what they are touching. Thus:

The first touched the tusk and claimed it was like a spear.

The second touched the trunk and thought it was a snake.

The third touched the ear and said it was like a fan.

The fourth touched the leg and concluded it was like a tree.

The fifth touched the back and said it was like a wall.

The sixth touched the tail and said it was like a rope.

This parable is considered one of those stories we hear for a didactic purpose. Its intention is to guide the listener to discover the answer for themselves. In this case, ‘paradoxically’, we also find different interpretations as to where that didactic meaning is trying to lead us.

Thus, in some interpretations, we are told that the blind people discover their disagreements, suspecting that the others are not telling the truth, and may even come to blows due to the tension created in this experiment of reality. It is a conflictual issue: seeing ‘reality’ from a single perspective binds us to it and leads us to try to protect it. This is how conflict arises, small or large, depending on the opponents of these perspectives and the lengths they are willing to go to defend their ‘reason’ or ‘reality’.

In other interpretations, and perhaps this is why they are called ‘wise blind people’, they become aware of the conflict of perspectives and are able to accommodate more than one perspective. In this way, instead of conflict, a collaborative approach can be adopted. They listen to one another; perhaps one takes on the responsibility of noting down or taking these perspectives into account, and in this way, they discover what this ‘reality’ elephant is that they call by that name.

This is going to be a real-time ‘adventure’ through ‘reality’ that will unfold with each article and through the ‘interesting times’ we are about to experience. If ‘interesting times’ is in quotation marks, it means critical times, or rather, very critical times, and, paradoxically, also ‘interesting’ because of their novelty. Another way of reframing it, depending on whether you wish to view it from one perspective, the other, or both at once, is:

Let’s continue with the expedition’s explorers. We are over 8 billion of inhabitants, each with our own ‘reality’ or ‘map’, which has emerged from our biological (genetic) factors, our socio-cultural factors, that is to say, by the place and time of the ‘expedition’ or tribe that welcomes you to this planet Earth, and by the psychological factors one develops through conflictual interaction with other ‘realities’ and/or through collaborative interaction with a ‘reality’ that is emerging and changing.

As Heraclitus said, no one steps twice in the same river. Both oneself (one’s biology, one’s ideas…) and the individual drops of water that make up the river (the contexts) change over time.

At this point, you might be wondering who’s swimming in this river (Substack), and you might also be wondering what purpose there is in what I’m telling you. To answer the first question, you’ll find glimpses of my past and present ‘reality’ on my LinkedIn profile. You’ll see how my professional journey began in the physical sciences, as an engineer, and how I later moved into anthropology, the most humanistic of the social sciences. To talk about the future, or more specifically, the aims of this Substack, we turn to a third element: the arts. The art of writing, the art of storytelling, and the art of educating oneself and others to educate you can be laudable aims in this adventure.

In addition to this explorer’s perspective, let us delve into the map, and it is here that José Ortega y Gasset left us an aphorism we can explore to see that explorer-map interaction:

The keyword is ‘circumstance’, and it is repeated eleven times in the text ‘Meditations on Don Quixote’, where this aphorism by Ortega y Gasset emerged.

If we look at the etymology of ‘circumstance’, it is composed of the prefix circum- (around) and the verb stare (to stand or be firm), which literally means ‘that which stands around or that which surrounds’. As we have indicated previously, the flow of Heraclitus’ river of life, circumstances and the one who stands are constantly changing and interacting with other explorers and their ‘particular’ circumstances.

Here, in terms of simplification (black-and-white), two major paths emerge. One that we have already travelled through our ancestors: a social path, a great expedition, that of humankind, which emerged thousands of years ago. It branched out into different ‘expeditions’ (families, tribes, peoples…) that are present today in all terrestrial ecosystems, each with its own trajectory, bringing cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as other characteristics.

At the other end of the spectrum, on an individual path, we can see more than 8 billion single ‘expeditions’ moving across the planet Earth which, in a dystopian future, might not physically and naturally come together with others, but, in the style of The Matrix, possess that ‘cultural’ software which, in some way, unites them, yet each one experiences it as an ‘individual’ adventure, in this case, practically a cultural and single one.

It seems that the directors of The Matrix drew ‘cultural’ inspiration from Plato’s allegory of the cave. In that cave, the chained ‘individuals’ can only see straight ahead (in two dimensions) and observe the stories of those shadows on a wall, which others control thanks to a fire behind those ‘prisoners’ that acts as a projector. If they could only turn around and see the ‘fire’ as a third point (three dimensions), how would they react to that new ‘reality’? If, in addition to introducing that third perspective and the physical dimension of space, they could move about within the cave or outside it, that is, introduce time not passively, as when they were chained, but actively to gain autonomy, how would they react to that new ‘reality’? I’ll drop the red ‘pill’ here in case you want to answer…

Let us return to Ortega y Gasset’s aphorism and broaden its scope to identify a third element, the compass, thereby completing the explorer-compass-map triad mentioned at the start of this article. To do so, I shall expand the context in which the aphorism was situated, including the preceding and following paragraphs.

“My natural gateway to the universe opens through the passes of the Guadarrama or the countryside of Ontígola. This sector of the surrounding reality forms the other half of my being: only through it can I find my place and be fully myself. The most recent biological science studies the living organism as a composite unit of the body and its particular environment: so that the vital process consists not only of the body’s adaptation to its environment, but also of the environment’s adaptation to the body. The hand seeks to mould itself to the material object in order to grasp it firmly; but, at the same time, every material object conceals a prior affinity with a particular hand.

I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I do not save myself. Benefac loco illi quo natus es, we read in the Bible. And in the Platonic school, we are given this as the task of all culture: ‘to save appearances’, the phenomena. That is to say, to seek the meaning of what surrounds us.”

In the previous paragraph, Ortega y Gasset plays with the spatial dimensions of his writing, like an explorer and his surroundings. From Madrid, where he was born and lived for quite some time, Ontígola lies to the south and Guadarrama to the north. He then speaks of ‘adaptation’ in two directions: from the environment to the body and from the body to the environment. And surprise… he speaks of hands… if you’ve noticed the logo of ‘that explorer is not the expedition’ on Substack, it is made up of four hands, like the four directions on that map I drew up 14 years ago.

Regarding the paragraph following Ortega y Gasset’s aphorism, we find “Benefac loco illi quo natus es”, which means “Do good to the place where you were born” and is perhaps the most significant element of that part of the paragraph. ‘Do good to the place where you were born’ expands the individual and their circumstances with a third element: a direction or compass.

And this element also emerges in this Substack: it cannot be answered by this initial article, but rather time and writing, along with its reading and discussion in the comments, will dictate whether I have done well to start this Substack. Digital technological ‘magic’, whilst it exists and functions, no longer merely expands my circumstances to a local context, but also to a glocal context, where space is no longer limited to where I am physically situated and its surroundings, but extends to you, who might be in a small village in South Africa, in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, or in a remote spot in the Amazon with a satellite internet connection.

So, I’ve introduced the explorer, or explorers, myself, and you all, in case you fancy peeking through this adventure. I have also introduced the concept with a certain ambiguity regarding what it means to do good; perhaps later each of you will figure it out and it may come to mean something like this other teaser or red pill that you will see me write about many times: ‘creating meaningful synergies’ (where you were born, the town where you live, or anywhere on planet Earth). Finally, what lies ahead in all the articles I write is the interaction between the map and the territory, where reality is more of an experience than a concept.

Therefore, in these first articles, it would be useful to know how to use the tools I have designed. I will explain how I understand them to work, but you may well discover other functions that I am unaware of. Afterwards, we can venture out into ‘reality’, the territory, and experience how they work and how they help us analyse and respond to any of my/your ‘explorer’ projects or projects that address global conflicts, such as the planetary crisis, wars, or local conflicts. The former interacts with the local ones, and they are those occurring internally within the countries and localities where you live, and, why not, your own personal conflict or crisis (opportunity) at the age of 20, 30, 40, 50…

To round off this first article, and by way of a teaser or a little curiosity, I’m going to show you the map/compass that I’ve been mapping out over the last few years.

It’s an ‘elephant’ made up of those ten tenets (in three parts: Head, Heart & Hands) that I’ve felt it was worth exploring to experience this adventure of ‘reality’ or human life. They can serve as a ‘toolkit’ to guide you on this journey or, in the style of MacGyver (an 80s series that was a part of my youth), help you respond to reality with greater clarity in dark or confusing times. In addition to these ten ‘tenets’, around them and like ‘circumstances’, there are the nine human needs that Carlos Mallmann left us as another compass-map of what it means to be human. Finally, of course, a third layer with blurred boundaries between the two previous layers, which are those three stages of a person’s journey: dependence at birth, the independence one begins to feel in youth as one moves into adulthood, and, finally, the ‘interdependence’ that one usually realises in our ‘Western societies’ when that personal crisis I mentioned earlier arrives. My aphorism, “Being independent depends on interdependence”, serves as a paradoxical and complementary counterpoint to the name of this Substack, “The explorer is not the expedition”.

To zoom in on that map, let’s separate the two most complex elements with an appropriate zoom. The ten tenets would be more detailed in this way.

On my LinkedIn profile, which I set up just over five years ago (these days I have updated to frame the ‘small islands of sanity’ (sis) project), I wrote the following, which may serve as a guide to answering the question: What is reality? (or also, ‘What is life?’ as part of a greater reality)

What is “Life”?

Answering this question implies that there are several answers, depending on the point of view we take, whether from Science, Philosophy or Art.

In “Art”, I find three powerful metaphors that we live by: “Life is a game”; “Life is a theatre”; “Life is a journey”. These metaphors are intermingled, and sometimes, we use the frames they create. If it is a game, there are usually rules and norms. We learn those rules and apply them. The opposite is also possible - we learn them, challenge them and change them. If it is a theatre, we are usually actors playing a role. We learn that role, but we also challenge it through improvisation and by changing the script. Finally, if life is a journey, I find three major intermingled displacements, spatial, temporal and energetic: the physical displacements between the cradle and the grave, the temporal passing of those years, and the different “energetic forces” we employ depending on the space and time we are living in. What unites these three metaphors is change.

If we reflect and go back to our birth, we will see how the rules, the scripts and the paths are changing. If we choose as a powerful metaphor, “Life is a journey”, three questions come to mind: Can anyone guide us? Is there a map? Do we have a compass to find direction? The search for answers to these three questions defines me as an “Explorer” within three great journeys that accompany us on our personal journey: “The journey of Life”, “The journey of the species”, and “The journey of the group”. To answer these three questions, I have developed an explorer’s hat, a map to explore with, and a compass to use. These are the 10 “concepts” that I consider most important in this journey of life and that I continue to explore through Science, Philosophy and Art:

*(EXPLORER) (HEAD) (Critical Thinking, Systems Thinking, Paradoxical Thinking).

*(COMPASS) (HEART) (Path-dependency, Context-sensitive, Values-driven)

*(MAP) (HANDS) (The Vital Hand, The Solidarity Hand, The Responsible Hand, The Conscious Hand)

... but we must always remember that:

The Explorer is not the Expedition.

The Compass is not the Direction.

The Map is not the Territory.

These are the 10 tenets, or that ‘toolbox’ or ‘toolkit’ for an explorer, that we will be taking on this expedition, and we will see in the coming articles how they work.

As for the other element, the ‘circumstances’ or Mallmann’s nine human needs would look like this when his original 1973 model is redesigned in a circular format.

There we can see three layers:

• In the inner circle, the nine human needs, i.e. our inner questions.

• In the middle circle, we find an empty circle into which I believe this aphorism by Viktor E. Frankl would fit very well: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

• In the outermost circle are our responses, the satisfiers, which Mallmann also divided into three further layers depending on the context: intra-human, inter-human, and extra-human.

It would also be worth adding, to those needs and satisfiers that may apply more individually, the five processes Mallmann left us to apply, presumably, collectively over time: Generation, Maintenance, Distribution, Exchange, and Use.

Among Mallmann’s papers and documents, I did not find much information on these five processes. However, building on his work, I have outlined what the blind spots in each of these five processes, within our Western societies, have created, which encompasses what we call a polycrisis or metacrisis.

I have arranged them in a circle, moving clockwise, but there are undoubtedly non-linear interactions among them. What is also very certain is that everything begins with generation and ends with use, giving rise to another cycle of generation or regeneration.

Finally, as I have sought to emphasise in this first article, using the metaphor of the map and the compass, explorers are also needed. If your response to your ‘reality’ is to have taken that red pill I have shown you, to move in three directions through that cavern and to follow your instinct “Benefac loco illi quo natus es” (Do good to the place where you were born), that is, anyplace in the Earth, then…

I welcome you to this expedition.

If you’re still on the fence and need a bit of a ‘nudge’, here’s Chapter 41 of the Dao De Jing, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s modern version:

On and Off

Thoughtful people hear about the Way

and try hard to follow it.

Ordinary people hear about the Way

and wander onto it and off it.

Thoughtless people hear about the Way

and make jokes about it.

It wouldn’t be the Way

if there weren’t jokes about it.

So they say:

The Way’s brightness looks like darkness;

advancing on the Way feels like retreating;

the plain Way seems hard going.

The height of power seems a valley;

the amplest power seems not enough;

the firmest power seems feeble.

Perfect whiteness looks dirty.

The pure and simple looks chaotic.

The great square has no corners.

The great vessel is never finished.

The great tone is barely heard.

The great thought can’t be thought.

The Way is hidden

in its namelessness.

But only the Way

begins, sustains, fulfills.

As you’ll see, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth between my LinkedIn and this Substack to bring full circle the infographic on ‘truth’ that opened this first article; I’m bringing it full circle with my latest monthly LinkedIn newsletter, ‘Creating Meaningful Synergies’, where that ‘truth’ is accompanied, in the motto of the Founding Mothers Movement, by two further dimensions: Love and Light. I hope there is ‘love’ in this collaboration between ‘explorers’ and that we shed light on the elephant in the room that is ‘reality’.

**The second stage of this journey is now all set:

Exploring the map of life: The compass that touches and moves us

Share The Explorer is not the Expedition

Subscribe now