What Is the Relational Being Project?

The idea is simple, really. Our revered ancestors lived in relational being for about 294,000 years, and then Civilization suppressed that way of life over the past 6,000 years.

Even though their physical circumstances could be very challenging, they thrived psychologically for 98% of our species’ entire existence.

We, on the other hand—the vast majority of us—have been subjected to systematic and sustained injustice, steep hierarchies, enduring poverty, deprivation, and great suffering for most of the last six millennia. Even the improvements of the past few centuries have come at the cost of severe hardship for greater absolute numbers of people, as well as global warming. And you know all the other risks of the current polycrisis.

We and a great many other species are circling the drain, given our current decadent values and the suppression of the RB that once helped us thrive.

So it is only common sense to reverse course completely. No, we don’t go back to hunting gazelles in the Kalahari, as the hunter-gatherers on our main page were doing before confronting that terrifying vision of the future in the distance. But we can—and must—reengage with relational being as they did, if only to save our species.

This website—The Relational Being Project (RBP)—is dedicated to that proposition. It is one small part of an overarching process in which we all help each other discover and return to healthier values and ways of being and relating with the world.

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Relational being is essential to the health of our psyches—the integration of body, animal nature, instincts, intuitions, emotions, and unconscious and conscious thinking abilities.¹ But after six millennia of attacks on RB, today we are mostly these conscious thinking units who take pride in thinking rationally, expressing our superiority through what we buy, knowing right from wrong, and measuring our success through competition, mastery, and domination. Reduced to a small part of our former full humanity, we have learned to privilege the fragile remnants—mind, thinking, and spirit—over the rest of our being and the physical world itself. This is the attitude of rising above and going beyond physical reality: the belief that invisible things and essences we can never locate are somehow more real than the things we can perceive.

It seems perfectly natural to us today because Civilization constantly instills this inverted perspective. Our former immanent interaction with physical reality, nature, the cosmos, each other, and even ourselves—where we once freely engaged the fullness of our bodies and animal being—was gradually displaced by a transcendent orientation that devalued all of them. Abstractions of thought increasingly distanced us from the source: the primary experience of life in nature. Early on, stern male sky gods became prevalent alongside the patriarchy that divided us and so profoundly harmed women. The pattern has only intensified since.

The more we abstract, live with broken and partial psyches, separate ourselves from the physical world, and adopt the decadent values that accompany those separations, the more Civilization and its power brokers benefit. Supposedly powerful, free-willed capitalist individuals who can speak directly to the Almighty, we are actually imprisoned in individual cells—separated from our fuller being, from each other, and from the world.²

Look, Civilization is not so opposed to nature simply because it seeks constantly to tear it apart and pry away its precious resources. That part is relatively easy. No, Civilization both fears and despises nature because it could never exist in its present form if the values and ways of living consistent with the natural order were widely embraced.³

This is why relational being matters. It helps make us fully human again and serves as an antidote to the decadent and destructive practices of a Civilization that must fragment, isolate, and confuse us in order to operate.

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Why RB is also necessary—and so fundamental—can best be understood by taking a snapshot of physical reality, something like the picture modern physics gives us. What we find is not a universe of isolated, static things, but matter and energy in continuous interaction and transformation. Physical entities combine, separate, exchange energy, move, decay, and form new configurations. At any given moment, reality consists of vast webs of relationships in time and space. Nothing exists entirely unto itself.

This alone provides a remarkable opening for relational being. Reality is dynamic and interactive rather than a collection of permanently fixed things. That insight is hardly new; it reaches back at least to Heraclitus. But lest it seem almost too obvious to matter, consider what follows from it. It stands in striking contrast to conceptions of perfection and ideal states that have appeared again and again—from Buddhist enlightenment to Mormon heaven. Permanence and perfection are imposed abstractions; they are not how the physical universe behaves.

What is commonly presented as a cold or mechanistic materialism therefore opens onto something very different. We are ourselves participants in these webs of relationship, part of a resplendent array of combinations and interactions. For human beings with fully engaged psyches, this is anything but mundane or lifeless. It is a feast of the senses: vibrant, vital, embodied experience of a world with which we are already in relationship. This is why RB is so very healthy for us.

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Now we can always learn from the vast perspective, and what could be larger or longer than the history of the universe?

One way of capturing that is:

Big Bang → particles and nuclei → atoms → stars and galaxies

→ heavier elements → planets → chemistry → life

→ biological evolution → nervous systems → animal consciousness

→ human symbolic/abstract thought⁴

—and then, as described above, the bizarre inversion from the experience of concrete reality toward abstractions, invisible essences and ideals that characterizes our world today.

Please keep this in mind as I show how the cosmological scale is closely associated with relational being. I contend, without trying to reconfigure physics in any way, that from the earliest history of the universe—some 13.8 billion years ago—physical reality has involved interaction among particles, fields, forces, matter and energy. This might seem like an unnecessary statement, but I derive four important principles from it.

First, in deep time and today, everything shares a common physical basis, while the interconvertibility of mass and energy⁵ further demonstrates that the physical world is not composed of fundamentally separate kinds of reality. The stuff that makes everything—including us—belongs to the same material universe. Differences in complexity, organization and capacities are enormous, of course, but none of them establishes that our species occupies some separate or superior category of material existence. Human exceptionalism therefore cannot be grounded simply in the physical stuff of which we are made.

Second, interrelationship, interconvertibility and this common physical basis mean that everything naturally fits within the cosmos. That may seem indisputable, but I think something important follows quite naturally from it: everything, including our species, belongs here.⁶ Nothing has to grant that belonging to us. The reason I draw this out is to establish that being in the universe is natural and belonging is therefore our ontological birthright. And based on the foregoing argument, nothing belongs more than anything else.⁷

This realization alone should help us stop privileging our species over every other animal, creature, plant or object. But it also helps make clear why the supposed protections we encounter in Civilization—law, social contracts, human rights and so forth—became necessary within that stage. And this does not just concern cosmological time, but the 294,000 years preceding Civilization. The relational interactions of the universe require no such protections; neither did belonging itself have to be granted to us.

Third, this helps us understand how strange it is to keep on privileging conscious thought, mind, or spirit over physical reality and over the deeper parts of our shared humanity. If we reduce the cosmological scale to a single calendar year, symbolic thinking appears only in roughly the final three minutes of December 31.⁴ Yet this extraordinarily late development has come to occupy such a commanding position that its products—abstractions, invisible essences and ideals—are routinely privileged over the physical reality from which thought itself emerged.

We have repeatedly managed to accept comparable acts of decentering. We eventually came around to Copernicus’ revelation that Earth was not the center of the solar system or, indeed, God’s cosmogony. A century ago we learned that our galaxy was not the only galaxy. We cracked the genetic code and learned how DNA encodes genetic information. But we still have not come close to dislodging conscious thought, mind and spirit from the sky-high pedestal on which we have placed them. That privileging runs directly contrary to relational being: it keeps our psyches fragmented and prevents us from fully experiencing the abiding web of relationships in which we already exist.

Fourth, RB is in no way the private preserve of any one person; indeed, it cannot exist solely within some internal sphere, whatever we call it. Relational being, just as with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, can only fully exist in conjunction with other people, groups and communities. I see it as a constant interaction between psyche and the external world. Each helps constitute the other—person and sociocultural sphere (SCS), along with the many relationships between them.

Now, when we put all these factors together, relational being cannot exist nearly fully enough where serious injustice prevails. In human life, the relationships emerging from this much deeper material history can only flourish through common material composition, ontological belonging, living webs of relationship, the integrated psyche, continuing interaction between psyche and SCS, and freedom from relationships structured by injustice. If this list seems a bit long, it is actually an abbreviated statement of the totality of reality that permeates relational being.

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The Relational Being Project is about reclaiming our heritage and our capacity to thrive as fully human beings. That will not be easy. Six thousand years of Civilization have profoundly altered how we understand reality, ourselves, each other, and our place in the world. Reengaging relational being therefore means much more than adopting a new set of ideas. It means changing how we live and relate.

The RBP is an invitation to participate in a kind of Wikipedia—or, better stated, a worldwide commons of being. This is only one website, but it could become part of hundreds of millions of places where people learn about RB together, practice it together, and resist its continued suppression.

The problems confronting us will not be solved by better political tactics, technological miracles, or engineering fixes alone. We cannot repair our relationship with the world while remaining fragmented within ourselves and separated from each other. Our psyches and our relationships must become part of the transformation.

That is why reengaging relational being can make such a profound difference. This is about recovering our lost capacity to be fully human—and discovering together what that can mean now.

Join the RBP, and let’s change that together.

Footnotes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment provides an important philosophical parallel to this account of relational being. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he rejects the separation of consciousness from the body and treats embodied perception as our primary mode of access to the world. We do not first exist as detached thinking subjects who subsequently encounter an external reality; we are bodily beings already situated within and engaged with a world.

2. This formulation refers to what I call the Protestant Individual (PI), whose emergence I trace through a much longer historical development culminating in the Reformation and the rise of modern individualism. The apparent liberation was extraordinary: the individual increasingly stood alone before God, could encounter scripture without priestly mediation, and eventually came to understand himself as autonomous, self-directing, rational, and free. The same individual became ideally suited to the emerging capitalist order—responsible for his own choices, advancement, consumption, beliefs, morality, and fate. Yet this apparent empowerment contained a profound contradiction. The more the individual was elevated as the fundamental unit of human existence, the more thoroughly human beings could be separated from the relationships that had constituted them: relationships within the integrated psyche, with other people, with nature and the physical world, and with the larger communities upon which human life had always depended. The “individual cell” is therefore both metaphor and description: the supposedly sovereign individual experiences the boundaries of the isolated self as freedom even as those boundaries become a form of confinement. Civilization does not simply repress this individual; it teaches the individual to experience separation itself as autonomy and therefore to participate willingly in maintaining it. This is the central paradox I explore under the phrase the prison of freedom. For a concise account, see the entry on the Protestant Individual in the Terms section; for the historical development and full argument, see The Protestant Individual—Prison of Freedom.

3. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947). Their account traces the drive to master nature through abstraction, calculation, classification, and instrumental reason, while arguing that the domination of external nature becomes inseparable from the domination of human beings and their own internal nature. Although the RBP develops this process across a much longer historical period and within a different theoretical framework, Horkheimer and Adorno provide an important twentieth-century precedent for understanding the domination of nature and the reduction of human experience as interconnected processes.

4. Here I treat behavioral modernity not as a single event but as a transition, approximately 80,000–50,000 BCE, between Stage I and Stage II of human development. The period marks the increasing prominence of symbolic and abstract thought, evidenced in such developments as symbolic objects, ornamentation, increasingly complex technologies, long-distance exchange, and other forms of behavior associated with modern human cognition. On a calendar compressing the universe’s approximately 13.8-billion-year history into a single year, this transition would occur only during roughly the final three minutes of December 31.

5. “Interconvertible” is used here as shorthand for mass–energy equivalence. Einstein’s E = mc² establishes the equivalence of mass and energy; in appropriate physical processes, mass can be converted into other forms of energy and energy can produce particles possessing mass. This does not mean that complex physical objects are simply interchangeable, but that they participate in the same underlying physical reality.

6. Cambridge Dictionary defines belong as “to be in the right place or a suitable place.” I use the term in precisely this ordinary sense before drawing its ontological implications.

7. An important philosophical precedent is Spinoza’s rejection of humanity as an “empire within an empire”—a realm somehow separate from the order of nature. For Spinoza, human beings belong entirely within nature and are subject to the same natural order as everything else. The concept of belonging as an “ontological birthright” is the formulation used here.