Thirteen Principles of Tree of Life Culture

The "tree of life" appears over the world in folklore, culture, religion and mythology relating to immortality and fertility. The tree of life is the link between heaven, the earth, and the underworld. It is also the ongoing tree of evolutionary divergence of the species over the life span of Earth. It was in Eden and its fruit are promised in the future paradise for the healing of the nations.

1. Knowledge and Way: Tree of Life culture is not a religion, belief, or faith, but a description of our existential condition and evolutionary relationship with the universe at large, and a recipe and living practice, way, or path, for finding our own personal happiness and meaning in life, by fertilizing the Earth's living diversity, and providing the best for our future generations, and all the generations of life.

2. Celebration: Tree of Life culture can be celebrated through all the forms of creative process, ceremony and pageant that human society is capable of, from celebrating friendship and fertility in good partying and playing music together, artistic and musical performance, natural restoration projects, scientific discoveries, spiritual meditations celebrations and vigils, rites of passage, such as those of the seasons, birth, death and 'sacred marriage' - consecrating partnership and sexual union.

3. Emergence and Evolution: The emergence and evolution of life is a cosmological result of the symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature in the cosmic origin. Evolving life is the climax interactive expression in complexity of the cosmic emergence, involving all the forces of nature in fractal interaction.

4. Meaning and Purpose: The purpose of conscious life is, on an immediate footing, to anticipate future threats to survival, and on a wider footing, to enable the universe to experience its own evolution and to safeguard the ongoing diversity of life, to enable new forms of conscious awareness to emerge. The validity and meaning of life and conscious experience is undiminished in space-time even if biological life eventually becomes consumed in the ultimate fate of the universe. Indeed without these conditions life could not exist.

Tane Mahuta - Kauri NZ - Tane grew to separate Earth and Sky - Papa and Rangi

5. Humanity: The role of humanity as a climax species is to safeguard the diversity of life on Earth and to facilitate its fertilization to other parts of the galaxy to enrich the ongoing life of the universe and to protect against planetary catastrophe on Earth. It is up to each generation of life to take the personal responsibility to ensure the best route for the flowering of life in future.

6. Action and Will: The exact purpose of human action and of each individual's action cannot be determined in advance because we are all engaged in a conscious creative process and we are participating consciously in this process and interacting with it, so it cannot be predetermined in advance in a final cause. The subjective experience of conscious autonomy over one's fate - or free-will - is a manifestation of the interaction of consciousness in unstable brain dynamics with quantum uncertainty.

7. Complementarity: Sexuality, sexual love and the love of offspring and the family are central to the generation and safeguarding of life and are an expression of the symmetry-broken complementarity at the root of the cosmic emergence, expressed in many forms such as wave-particle, mind-body, and female-male.

8. Sexual conflict: Sexual and reproductive choices are a strategic necessity for both females and males as a primary component of safeguarding the ongoing passage of the generations. Female and male strategies differ and are in partial conflict, because it is females who have by far the greatest investment in pregnancy, lactation and child rearing, and it is from the complementarity and instability of these differences and each sex having to court and respect the other's choices that super-intelligence emerges in humanity.

9. Reproductive choice: For the above reason, while it is desirable for sexual and all relationships to be as honest, trusting and loving as possible, each sex has to be free to make reproductive choices without fear of violence. It is a violation of reproductive freedom of choice for either sex to attempt to institute religious or other punishments to attempt to control the reproductive or sexual choices of the opposite sex.


10. First person vision: Exploration of the mystical, visionary, or spiritual aspects of conscious existence are the responsibility of each of us as sentient conscious beings in the first person.

11. Religious, spiritual and moral freedom: While we can, in the process of sharing insights and experiences, offer good advice to one another about how to live our lives, in the second person, it is an oppressive violation of subjective conscious freedom of choice and the very purpose of conscious existence, to attempt to assert third person accounts, such as moral, or religious beliefs, claims to utopian apocalyptic imperatives, absolute claims that others should follow God, alLlah, or a god or goddess, or any particular spiritual path, or that anyone should be in fear of divine or earthly punishment for transgressing any religious law or code.

12. Power plants, contemplation and dreaming: Visionary power plants and fungi as well as certain meditative practices of contemplation, and dreaming consciousness, provide direct veridical means for the subjective exploration of the conscious realm in the first person, without corruption by religious, or spiritual doctrine, or dogma. As a psychic equivalent of food species, with which we inter-depend, visionary power plants and fungi form one of the most direct avenues to understanding our ongoing relationship with the diversity of life. To ban their use is also an oppressive violation of subjective conscious freedom.

13. Reflowering the Planet: Restoration of planetary fecundity and the reflowering of life's diversity and liberation from human jeopardy is directly in the interests of the future of our own offspring as well as the future of life and is the most urgent issue facing humanity. Current disruption of climatic stability, planet-wide exploitation leading to a mass extinction of living diversity and nuclear overkill is completely inconsistent with this role. These processes are being driven both by a tragedy of the commons caused by selfish winner-take-all exploitation, mutual paranoia, and religious agendas which fail to respect nature as the foundation of existence.