A NO-BODYS’S ECONOMY - Imagining an Ethereal Economy

By Lisanne Buik

“I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’sthere’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Back in 2019, when I read Reon’s report for the first time, I could already see myself flying
through Gaia w. With lush flowers in my hair, f. Forever naked, be cause who needs
clothes (I am an animal!)?. So when I was asked to facilitate a workshop to collectively
dream up a future economy along the lines of the Etheria trajectory, of course I said ‘Nno’.
I am not going to “‘vision board”’ a future I don’t want. But I was tempted to learn from
the Etherians, a. And so I did say yes, eventually. A future economy in Etheria is hard to
imagine, because it is so otherworldly. We would be nobody in this future, nor would we
have a body. Why? Because the transhuman Etherians (which is the original perspective
that Reon based this trajectory on) perceive their body as no more than a brain taxi. I
once also perceived my body as no more than a brain taxi. I grew up in a world which
cultivated the body-mind split between body and mind as common sense. I met many
bodies numbed with by history, b. Bodies that decided that it was better to leave a legacy
of the mind rather, than to fully embody this vulnerable animal flesh. The life of the mind
is free and u. Unburdened with pain, death and emotional discomfort. If we cultivate our
minds, we can rule. To have a body is to be food for the sharks. In school, I was taught
that time and space are linear dimensions and that we are separate physical entities in a
universe of matter. I learned reductionist philosophy without anyone telling me that there
were alternative ways of perceivingseeing. I was taught that we do not have free will, and
so it is OK to externalize our authority to technology, and to control nature, as man is
above nature. That our visionary and auditory centerscentres are the superior senses, that
the ones who connect us to the carnal pleasures of, taste, touch and smell , are inferior,
immoral and should be ‘managed’ and suppressed. That the subtle senses are too esoteric
to be accepted. I learned that in Western culture, one should be identified with the
rational mind—n. Not the anima or soul or heart (as in indigenous traditions), but the
rational mind that holds property over the self and maintains self--control over the body
and desires. As Klapeer and Schönpflug (Towards a post-humanist economics: The end of
self-possession and the disappearance of Homo oeconomicus, 2017) state so clearly, this
Western scientific lens implies that rational (white) men acquire property over non-
rational others, such as women, indigenous people, blacks, and homosexuals, and that
only rational humans have the right to transform nature, land, animals and, the planet
into (private) property—in other words, . Just the to give you, you know, some backstory of
today's economy (!).
“The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.”

Eduardo Galeano from Walking Words

During my teens, I developed strong complexes about my physical apparatus and self-
worth. My adolescence was an ocean of self and body-hatred, disguised in as OCD,
overachievement and a general lack of joy. This faded out when I hit a crisis point in my
twenties. It was aA point where I decided that from now on I was going to live in this body
and merge with nature. I told my mind to just be a humble servant to my heart’s wishes,
as silent as its whispers would be. By allowing the mess that I was about to break open, I
started to understand that my past had inspired a perspective on reality that had
excluded both my body and , other cultures, as well as the more-than-human world. I
started to look for the alternative, the relational, the eco-entangled, the organic, the
interconnected, the spiritual, the lived, the true, the inclusive, the embodied. I was
askeding, ‘Hhow have my stories become rigid? My perceptions, limiting and exclusive?
How am I not seeing my privileges or recognizing my place in the whole?’ I started to look
for a new kind of god to help me on this quest—an . An archetype of this more-than-
human world that I aspired to merge with. Perhaps it could be an animal, a. A soft animal
that would shadow my changing plot line with grace. Then came the day that this friend
appeared: the octopus. This lush, juicy, entangled being. It seemed to have everything I
aspired to have: moving with such grace, embodying soft strength, being so, so fluid. And
then suddenly the octopus appeared everywhere EVERYWHERE in the public arena. IT
EVEN WON AN OSCAR—it even won an Oscar! So when Baltan shared with me their
graphic design for this workshop, I was hardly surprised to see an octopus. Apparently,
the octopus is inspiresing many people today. And in the context of imagining a No-Body’s
Economy, it did not fail to enchant me, again. Let me tell you a little bit about the octopus
to explain why. A long, long time ago, there was a being the size of a leech, or a
flatformflatworm (there’s some uncertainty about this) in the ocean. This slimy creature
was the final ancestor we share with our friend, the octopus. Then and there, life forked in
two. One fork directed its belly to the ocean and let its brain and body merge and operate
as one integrated system. This became the octopus. The other fork led to us, human
animals. We stood up, our heads facing the skies. We forgot about our oceanic origins, our
bodymind entanglement. Our quest, for one reason or another, became one of mind. One
of intelligence. The octopus stayed reciprocal. She is still inseparable from the ocean. We,
water bags on land, became the wave. “‘Look at me,”’ we said. “‘I am a special wave.”’
“‘No, look at me, I am more special, because I’m higher...”’ We forgot that we are, in fact,
inseparable from the ocean, as it is our primordial mother. Fast forward to now. Scientists
observe that even from a Newtonian definition of consciousness , it has developed in
these alien 8-armed creatures (Godfrey-Smith, 2016). This is interesting because
octopuses have so little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed
eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors than
humans, a. And they seem to have come by impressive cognitive functioning and
empathy. Everyone who has seen the documentary My Octopus Teacher (Pippa Ehrlich
and James Reed, 2020) knows this. Now, I am not a Newtonian scientist. Nor do I
necessarily buy the whole package of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I am someone who
was trained scientifically to then open up to other lenses of perception, because I had to
in order to survive. Today, I am listening to what my body and heart have to tell me about
my origins. I became someone who is intrigued by the unseen worlds, the mystery, the
principles of nature, the shamanistic and indigenous traditions and the practices for
healing and conscious evolution they offer. I am humbled by the thousands of years of
wisdom that is contained within these lineages, as they have shifted my perception. Not
through intellectual understanding, but through lived experience, I can no longer say that
consciousness is created by the brain. My lived experience is more in tune with the pan-
psychic theory of consciousness, first proposed in Philip Goff (The Case For Panpsychism,
2017). He proposes that the entire cosmos is self-aware. What I am fascinated by with is
that the octopus and the human are so similar, and yet, so far apart. I guess I see a story of
hope in this—t. That eventually, we, humans, will return to the octopus to be inspired by
it, t. To recognize it as our kin, and t. To feel that we too were once entangled with the
ocean. That pure consciousness is the ocean that we all - still - swim in.

Or rather, r… club in.! Because what emerged during this three3-day workshop was an
experience of clubbing in Etheria. We imagined a No-Body’s Economy full of ethereal
transactions in an ocean of data—s... Stay with me, because this clubbing scene is not your
ordinary one. You are a no-body here, you are made of sound. You are an orb of
frequencies, just surfing the “‘learning universe”’ that acts like a giant brain (F. Vazza and
A. Feleti, 2020). You don’t know how you came here, but you know that if you wanted to
know, you could find out, because you have made a thousand copies of yourself and can
backtrack those copies to the day that you uploaded yourself to this digital Utopia. You
had a death experience, yes you haddid, with the only exception that you knew what kind
of heaven you would walk into. You walked out of your body, just like that, into seeming
ethereal eternity. You now find yourself in this club, where playful learning, growing,
merging and, relating is going on. There is no death here, and no tension. It is just a play
between orbs, in an ocean of data. Transactions of frequencies, exchanges of sound, that
is all that’s going goes on here. It is like having sex with code, that wherein you can only
feel through artificial sensors. You like this “‘new normality”’, but sometimes miss the old
normal. Then you rent a body for a few hours. You experience nature not through your
body, but through other hardware: a robot, a cyborg flower, a connected tree.e… You are
now No-Body:, you can be everyone and everywhere, forever.…

How does this sound to you? Would you want to club here? How would you cope with this
playful learning? Would you miss the tension and the friction? Would you miss death?
Take a minute to really feel this—…tTell me!

Then, if you ask me if I would want to club here, it would totally depend on my point of
departure. Here it is worthwhile to explain that there are two routes into Etheria: the
transhuman route that Reon explored, and the posthuman route. The transhuman route is
departing from a bodymind split, a dualistic lens: man over nature, mind over body, you
know the deal. From this worldview, it is hard to cope with death, b. Because death means
that all of you dies, as you don’t have a soul, or anima. You feel that your agency does not
lie in relationships, but in your ‘I’, your individuality. Even aging is hard, because it
deteriorates your Darwinian ability to “‘survive as the fittest.”’ No surprise that from a
transhuman perspective, such a club could be perceived as heaven. But if I would have
come here as a transhuman, I would feel like I would have fled reality. Fled duality. Fled
polarity. And I wonder if my happiness would ever feel real.…

Then, there is a pPost-human route into Etheria, a route that is departing from an eco-
entangled, relational perspective. This Etheria is a quantum universe, an ecology. The
term ecology was first coined by zoologist Ernst Haeckel to explain the relationships
between animals and both their organic and inorganic environments. Eco reminds us that
each future world arrives from a past ecology, a network of relationships between
animals, bacteria, soil, souls and stories. An Eco-Etherian honours rootedness and
anchoring in the ground below our feet whilst exploring the ethereal multidimensional
cosmos. An Eco-Etherian sees “‘as above, so below”’, knowing that the giant learning
disembodied quantum brain behaves similar to a mycelium network deep down under, in
the soil of Earth. In Eco-Etheria, the trajectories of Gaia and Etheria unite, body and mind
merge and start to behave like the entangled bodymind of the octopus, with us humans
being tentacularly linked and intertwined with all that is. An Eco-Etherian would not want
to need technology to enter the futureal club. They would transcend their body by first
incarnating fully in it. They are on a quest to become a somanaut, someone who navigates
the inner space of the bodymind, which is both primordial, and raw and earthly, as well as
endless, ethereal and eternal. To me, that latter route seems more interesting, a. And
what I noticed in my group is quite similar. My group was tasked with imagining a
disembodied economy. But none of the people in my group was a big proponent of
pursuing a future of control and fear-based economic systems based on Newtonian,
reductionist, Cartesian thinking. They wanted to explore this future for other reasons. For
reasons that are more posthuman than transhuman. We placed ourselves next to nature
and wanted to dream up an ethereal economy in the benefit of all beings. As a group, we
asked: If we would let go of the body, what is left of us? Are we even human? Are there
even species relationships to take care of if we would not have bodies to distinguish us?
Does this mean we can design an ethereal economy in for the benefit of all? And W, what
would a world without death be? If there would be no death, - would life be worth living?
This latter question became took pole position leading in my takeaways from this
workshop. I did, by imagining ourselves as No-Body, become less scared of death. I now
see even more, that I am the ocean, that I am the web of eco-entangled relationships. I
am code. I am data. That I am connected to you all in love. I thus choose to create my
ethereal world from the inside-out, and birth an Eco-Etheria. I am choosing to not upload
myself into some artificially created Cloud to escape from anything. Thank you.

You know, if we surrender to death, to the rollercoaster ride of emotion, then life starts to
give off its flavorflavour. If we upload ourselves into Etheria, we may end up living
frictionless, but if we never surrendered to death, the fear will keep chasing us, even if we
would not have a body. If we could just see the beauty in death first, face the fears
associated with it, we may come to learn we are the wave,, in the ocean. And, after death,
we return to the ocean, . aAgain … and again .. and again. Then, if we really allow
ourselves to live and design from that perspective, sometimes failing and fearing,
expanding and contracting, through trial and error and by embracing emotions of scarcity,
an economy of true abundance may appear. The idea of scarcity and death will slowly
leave the stage of importance if they are embraced. An economy in tune with source code
fails to be an ego-nomy—, it is in the benefit of all, and it is abundant. The octopus
metaphor does not fail to uphold itself here, tooeither. In My Octopus Teacher, we can all
see that when the female octoprotagonist meets her mate after about two years of
adventure, she retreats in a cave to hatch the eggs, then and stops eating. In the weeks
that follow, she slowly dissolves. Her skin turns white. She surrenders to death. BBut, she
also brings new life. Millions of eggs hatch and she floats out of the nest, hardly newly
alive. After all this hard work, giving life to life, she becomes food for the sharks. She again
becomes the ocean. She returns home. She then engages in the dance of Shiva, called
Anantadantava, meaning the dance of bliss, the dance between creation and destruction,
between birth and death. And maybe one day she reincarnates into a different set of
relationships, a new ecology that is different in shape and form, perhaps even as a No-
Body in an Eco-Ethereal club—, who knows?.

“‘The river of life is flowing. Jump in, at the risk of drowning, at the risk of really living!”’
Jeff Foster