The Original Chapter 11.

In the course of writing Harmogenincs: A Practical Guide to Constant Becoming my plans for chapter 11 changed. I chose to devote it to the important topic of friction within a life practice instead of the original chapter. I present here for those interested. There are a couple of nuggets to be found…

Chapter 11: Wishful Speculations

I have more sense than to expect harmogenics to alter the fabric of human society. Psychological concepts like flow or emotional intelligence also named something real and pre-existing in the 1990's. Since then, they helped millions of individuals recognize and cultivate certain capacities, influenced how we think about human experience, but they didn't fundamentally restructure our world. And that's perfectly fine. They're out there, gaining traction.

The fact that harmogenics is essentially free and available to everyone, yet will likely have limited adoption, tells us something profound about The Complex and The Weight, and the power of top-down values, meaning and purpose. But something extraordinary is possible for those few who sense there might be another way. And here's where our current moment offers unprecedented opportunity. It's more of a hope than a reality right now, of course. No one is thinking about harmogenics. It's a new word. It has to grow.

The internet, for all its contribution to The Complex, also enables the formation of distributed communities around shared practices rather than shared beliefs. You don't need to gather in a building or follow a guru or buy into a complete worldview. You can virtually connect with others who are also discovering that their scattered practices might be more connected than they realized. It's a start.

This is already happening in thousands of small ways online. Gardeners sharing heritage seeds and cultivation techniques across continents. Craftspeople teaching each other through videos and forums, each bringing their own cultural approaches to working with wood or clay or metal. People with depression supporting each other through their challenges while maintaining their own growth and identity.

Now imagine this principle applied to harmogenics. There are no leaders and followers, but a loose network of people who've recognized their own scattered practices and started experimenting with conscious integration. Each person working with their own unique constellation. Someone may be combining music, meditation, and endurance sports. Another person might approach it through food preparation, writing, and community organizing. Yet another is integrating gardening, psychology, and dance.

They're not trying to convert each other to their specific practices (conversion is not necessarily harmogenic). Instead, they're sharing what emerges, the unexpected connections, the surprises, the moments when practices suddenly transform into something newly beneficial, or unexpectedly deepens their capacities for life. They're comparing notes on emergence itself. This kind of cultural formation isn't top-down. There's no sophisticated doctrine to spread, no institution to build, no purity to maintain.

A harmogenic-style community would amplify the inherent diversity of humanity and empowering that diversity as never before.

The conversations alone would be revolutionary. Community discourse would center around explorations of what emerges from different combinations. "When I added cold exposure to my gratitude practice, something unexpected happened..." "Your description of flow in metalworking helped me understand what I experience in dance..." "The patience you've developed through calligraphy is similar to something I'm finding in my coding practice..."

These are all wishful speculations, of course. I'm not predicting this will happen on any large scale. Human nature being what it is, most people will continue to choose convenience over cultivation, prescribed meaning over Theit propagation, entertainment over engagement. The Complex will continue to offer its seductive simplicities, and The Weight will continue to exhaust people into compliance.

But, just as with flow and emotional intelligence, it doesn't need to happen on a large scale to be profoundly meaningful. If even small pockets of harmogenic culture emerge, dozens of people here, hundreds there, the ripple effects could be significant, through demonstrating that there's another way to approach values, meaning, and purpose. Through showing that bottom-up wisdom can be at least as profound any top-down teaching.

The beauty is that harmogenics doesn't require special equipment, expensive courses, or institutional support. It requires only the recognition that you're already cultivating various capacities, and the small shift in perspective that sees them as connected rather than separate. The practices themselves can be as humble as going for walks, washing dishes, conversing, or as sophisticated as advanced athletic training, artistic mastery, or scholarly pursuit. The magic isn't in what you practice as long as it cultivates and doesn't decultivate your well-being as we have defined it.

Living harmogenically changes you in ways you can't predict, that's the nature of Theit. But there are patterns, recognizable stages, common challenges and breakthroughs that many experience. There's the initial excitement of recognition, the honeymoon phase when everything seems to connect. Then comes the plateau, when practices feel routine and seem to stall. But if you stay with it, there are breakthrough moments when suddenly your practices reorganize themselves at a higher level of integration. And always, there's the ongoing dance between effort and ease, intention and surprise, cultivation and emergence.

Living this way also changes how you relate to others. You become less interested in converting people to your specific practices and more curious about what others are cultivating, whether they recognize it or not, what you can learn from them, how you might help each other. You develop a kind of Theit radar, the ability to sense the cultivation practices in others, to see the connections they haven't yet noticed, to witness their potential without needing to direct it. In this way, you cultivate respect and appreciation for others, even when you disagree with them. You will be surprised how inspiring this perspective can become.

Perhaps most profoundly, you develop a different relationship with time. The urgent push for immediate results that is so characteristic of The Complex gives way to what farmers know: you plant, you tend, you trust the season. Some years the harvest is abundant, others modest. But the practice itself, the daily engagement with cultivation, becomes its own reward, a lifestyle.

I've learned this from my life practice and from observing others who've happened upon this way of Being, whether they had a name for it or not. While the theory is (hopefully) intriguing, it's the lived experience that matters. It's through the daily practice, the gradual emergence, the surprising transformations that the real magic reveals itself.

And that magic? It's both more ordinary and more extraordinary than you might expect.