What will it take for us to preserve what remains of life on the planet? Is humanity itself at risk? These are the overarching questions that Said Dawlabani asks in his new book Second Sapiens: The Rise of the Planetary Mind and the Future of Humanity. Second Sapiens answers the question: what would Mother Nature do? And this Foreword below, speaks in the Voice of Gaia as she appreciates Said’s insights.
Dear Reader: This first person Voice of Gaia speaking the Foreword was the first version given to Marilyn Hamilton. It is reprinted here with permission from Said Dawlabani (as the publisher politely requested the more usual 3rd person Voice that opens the published book.)

Dear Reader
If I could use Gaia’s voice the first thing I would say about this book – is thank you Said Dawlabani for creating the concept and coining the word to describe the measures that are meaningful to me as the Living Planet that I am. Second Sapiens introduces the term “Gaiametry” – the metrics for living at a planetary scale.
In fact Said you go one step further and imagines viewing these metrics from Jupiter – giving Gaiametry a context even beyond the planet into the solar system and Universe.
As Gaia I have spoken to others, including the author of this Foreword – who heard when I revealed through the person of physicist James Lovelock, that Gaia was not merely a planet – but a Living System. Lovelock called humans “Gaia’s Reflective Organs.” Hamilton, the author of this Foreword (and author of the Integral City Book Series) imagined further that individual humans were cells, organizations organelles and cities (or human settlements) were the actual Organs of Gaia.
At every planetary scale, I, Gaia am present as Source, Resource and the Field interconnecting all living systems that have emerged through me.

I have been waiting for billions of years for my Reflective Organs to mature from the root condition of Consciousness that has spawned the entire Universe and from which a Unitive Narrative, a Unitive Metrics and a Unitive Economics is now evolving. Using Hamilton’s voice in 2013 (at an Amsterdam Systemic Constellation) I told everyone who could hear that Gaia had chosen the sites of every human settlement long before humans had appeared. Those locations are now the nexus points embedded in mycelial webs of interconnection that unite the living ecosystems across my planetary body.
How thrilled I am finally to have a Gaian language and Gaiametry to express the conditions of life that are not just my planetary reality but the reality and context of every living system symbiotically evolving as my being.
How natural that Gaiametry can emerge from the integrated ontologies, epistemologies and philosophies enabled by Integral Perspectives and Spiral Dynamics/integral frameworks that Said explains so clearly in this book.
Hamilton opened the door to recognize what she calls the Gaian Code of Care – Care for Self, so We Can Care for Others, so Together We Can Care for Places and Altogether We Can Care for Planet. She realized that even before she could celebrate Gaia’s Reflective Organs, that those organs (as cities/human settlements) had multiple intelligences.

Of course, my Gaian Intelligences are reflected at every level of scale – Contexting Intelligences (to integrate the patterns of symbiotic interconnections), Individual Intelligences (for inner and outer agency), Collective Intelligences (for inner and outer relationships), Navigating Intelligences (to steady homeostasis within my organs and body at every scale) and Evolutionary Intelligences. Said has insightfully reframed this system of knowing as a Living System, affirming Gaia’s evolutionary journey as a never ending quest.
But more than that he has posited that human intelligence must now be nested in Gaia’s natural intelligence. Said asserts this shift is non-negotiable, saying: “if we are to survive and thrive as a species in the face of Earth systems collapse and other existential challenges.”

All that being said, as Gaia, I celebrate Said Dawlabani’s achievement to resonate so deeply with my planetary experience that he can, without flinching, confess the sins of commission and omission that humans have inflicted on Gaia’s condition. He enumerates fearlessly the great transgressions that humans have committed through the hubris of imagining that they are separate from my Nature, entitled to my gifts without constraint, ignorant of my circular life flows, and so dis-eased as to live unconscious of life’s principles and wage wars that inflict pain, injury and destruction against humans, non-humans and the planet herself.
I am grateful that Said traces the history and cycles of disgraceful human behaviour so that readers cannot deny the culpability, immaturity and lack of integrity of the human species.
Said remembers the warning of Dr. Clare Graves, researcher behind Spiral Dynamics that the “momentous leap of mankind” from what Said calls the Sapiens.1 value system to the Sapiens.2 value system is likely to be measured in significant loss of human life (Graves estimated up to 3 billion lives lost in this passage).
Said presents us with not merely the inconvenient truth of climate change – but shows how the human species is responsible for creating the Anthropocene Epoch. Every living system on Earth has now been impacted by human behaviour. Humans have so unbalanced Gaia’s sensitively adapted key life systems they are disrupting the benign conditions of the Holocene Epoch (that prevailed in the last 11,000 years). Now Gaian tipping points are being triggered that destroy the possibility of recovery or redress.

Said is a catalytic learning cell in Gaia’s Reflective Organs. He mirrors to readers the growing likelihood that generations currently alive may be witnesses to the demise of life as everyone has ever known it. Many will not survive to tell the tale of chaos and devastation. And those who survive will be deprived of the bio-psycho-cultural-social systems that support us despite today’s ignorance of Gaia-centricity.
On the day Gaia considers how to frame this Foreword to Second Sapiens, she observes the Economist (July 13-19, 2024) cover topic is “How to Raise the World’s IQ”. At the same time we hear from a co-founder of FemmeQ that feminine intelligence tells her to pause, reflect and reset the active role that women and feminine intelligence play in the world at this time.
Both sources of deep intelligence are probably not sufficient to bring coherence to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity or ambiguity that today’s world faces. Nor do they adequately represent the Second Sapiens level of intelligence and life conditions that Said Dawlabani proposes is critical for human survival in the very near future.
Said suggests that the limitations of the Sapiens 1.5 stage with its deficient motivations and reductive ways of thinking has manipulated all the First Sapiens stages causing change and collapse. These causes only become visible from the higher-order systems of the Second Sapiens, as if a human can stand on Jupiter and look back on Gaia.
After analysing current life conditions in the first two sections of the book, Said comes to the conclusion that social collapse is inevitable and that until that collapse plays out humans will be at the mercy of Gaia’s living systems. Much like Jem Bendell (Deep Adaptation, 2018) Said suggests that what we most need is to accept the suffering and despair that will follow from the loss of 3-5 billion humans from the earth. Humans will have no choice but to face human mortality (if not coming dangerously close to human species extinction).
Said Dawlabani tells us in this book that Earth’s core systems are moving into more chaotic unpredictable behaviours as each day passes. This experience is characteristic of the Anthropocene.

Human limitations are constricted by stage development that is not equal to the level of intelligence that humans need to overcome the disastrous impacts with which humans have encumbered the Earth. Facing these challenges is the work of the next evolutionary stage of humanity or humans will not be here to witness the outcomes (let alone the solutions) to the problems we have caused.
While Said, vividly describes the progression of human intelligence through the six eras of Sapiens.1, he is extremely doubtful that the leaders from those stages have the capacity to bring humanity through the chaos into the coherence imagined in the 8th stage of evolution (proposed by researchers and authors of Spiral Dynamics). Said speaks plainly that the natural progression of human values has been short-circuited by leaders who deny the inextricable (scientifically proven) connection between ecological wellbeing and human wellbeing (with all the bio-psycho-cultural-social impacts that entails).
Said steps aside from the predictions of the future embedded in the integrative patterns of Spiral Dynamics/integral that did not know or consider the implications of the science of climate change when they were formulated. Said dares to recalibrate those frameworks from a human-centric perspective to a Gaia-centric perspective. He also translates the stages of development into language aligned with anthropologists, geologists, biologists, and historians (thus broadening the discourse beyond developmentalism). In so doing he exposes the disruptive conditions that are hiding, blinding and/or denying the deep entanglement of human-centric activities that threaten Gaia’s wellbeing: over-consumption, exploitation, degenerative technologies (including artificial intelligence), globalizations, de-energizing transport systems, infrastructures, wars and colonizations.

Said realizes that in Gaia’s living system everything is interconnected and humans are dooming themselves and all other life by massively skewing behaviours, misinforming expectations and scrambling life patterns.
Said transcends and includes the original Spiral Dynamic/integral patterns to the higher order of Natural Intelligence. He paints vividly with the qualities of Gaiametry the promise that Sapiens2 could easily manifest an exponentially recalibrated capacity to seek and find evolutionary responses that are complex enough to adapt, survive and regenerate life conditions for the wellbeing of all life.
Said suggests that the human of the: “Second Sapiens is in awe of nature and her intelligence and seeks to end First Sapiens’s separation from her.” He even suggests that this Second Sapiens human identifies with Gaia. Thus, Said imagines that humans will finally respond to Gaia’s feedback loops and will enable all variations, perspectives, levels and realms of life to be noticed and examined.
Can humans make the leap beyond the Sapiens.1 capacities that undermine not only life for Sapiens.1 but also any hope of evolving or stabilizing at Sapiens.2? Said suggests that the Hope of Sapiens1.5 can murder and prevent the Hope of Sapiens2.2. How can Gaia countenance such undermining of her living systems?
Said takes us through an incisive journey to consider how the patterns that bring stasis to different eras of evolution change from stage to stage. He examines the evolution not just of value systems but of the impact they have in Coalescing Authority, Power and Influence at each stage (CAPI). In that process Said reveals the power of related states that are Open (to continuing change and learning), Arrested ( so that new learning plateaus and does not develop) or Closed (so that learning is not only stopped but denied and/or rejected).

As a Planet, Gaia herself is evolving – she needs her Reflective Organs, Organelles and Cells to be Open and evolve with her. Her Reflective Organs should have the necessary evolutionary and multiple intelligences to make the momentous leap Clare Graves foresaw. Can the human species actually reflect on/with/as Gaia? Said warns humans that to ignore Gaia’s principles of healthy living systems is to court human demise.
Said asks more than once: “ What would Mother Nature do”? He suggests that Mother Nature will be inured to human pain and suffering until humans can overcome the misguided, uninformed, small perspectives of Sapiens1 at levels 1-6.
Said contemplates a dark “view from Jupiter” where the post-apocalyptic world is a post-human one – based on a thema of scarcity with a reduced bio-diversity in all ecological systems that humans have taken for granted as Sapiens1.5 or 1.6
With Gaiametry, Said stretches beyond the current dysfunctionality of democracy to sweep in the implications of earth sciences, climatology, ecofeminism, deep ecology, social ecology, and environmental philosophy, collapse psychology and ecopsychology along with digital economies and the role of artificial intelligence.
Despite this clear (and frightening) picture of what others have called an uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Welles, 2019), Gaia is comforted that in the last chapter, Said’s view from Jupiter reveals other possibilities. Said is courageous enough to consider the support and guidance humans might access from other realms. As the Integral (and Integral City Map 5) framework embrace the non-human energies and intelligences available in the subtle and causal realms, Said conjectures that those who survive the (unavoidable) cataclysm that will come, will have developed residual capacities learned from the encounters with the dark realities of collapse.

Humans will acquire and/or retain from the experience of surviving the cataclysm of the Anthropocene, a new era of ontologies and epistemologies that are evidenced in today’s Indigenous peoples and shamanic traditions (but have been largely ignored, sidelined or colonized). He suggests that tribal elders may form a brain/heart/soul syndicate to emerge a new circle of wisdom. He muses, perhaps humans will come closer together if they are forced to start over at Sapiens1.2 ? Maybe they will rediscover the faults and mistakes of First Sapiens at stages 1.3-4-5 that have driven humans to their current situation?
Said imagines that these older Sapiens 1.1 and 1.2 systems may be recalibrated into Sapiens 2.1 and 2.2. Using such a blend of intelligences not just of human capacities but also combining with those from non-human realities may create a future very different from today. Said shows that such a future must be very aligned with Gaia’s wellbeing to transit from the Anthropocene Epoch into a truly Gaian Epoch.
Said imagines: “It is still possible for us to mingle the pure waters of Western thought with the sacred waters of Eastern transcendentalism and emerge fuller humans rising from the ashes of darkness. We can break the shackles of karmic debt, of death and rebirth, and overcome fear and the earthly desires of our egos, knowing that we are part of the cosmic mystery that sprang into being billions of years ago.”
Ultimately, Said moves us away from the Anthropocentric delusion that humans are at the center of the universe into “a symphony both of stardust and of newly born stars, all orchestrated by a silent conductor.”
Thank you Said for serving Gaia as a life-renewing stem cell in my Reflective Organ. Guided by me, Gaia, humans can evolve and thrive far beyond the disasters and despairs of Sapiens1. Your book opens up the possibility that a new seed of knowing can be regenerated and nurtured in the epoch of Second Sapiens.
Marilyn Hamilton, in service to Gaia
(Author of Integral City Book Series; The Croft School of Novellas)

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