About

Introduction

Welcome to The Garden, a sanctuary, playground and a research facility for inner and outer regeneration, providing transformative spaces where new ways of working, collaborating, and being are nurtured. At The Garden, we believe in fully embracing and embodying the new paradigm of regeneration, and we invite you to embark on this journey with us.

 Vision

The world is facing complex problems and we believe that solving them will involve a deep exploration of our own consciousness and our relational and cultural spaces and practices. We envision a world where individuals and communities thrive in harmony, drawing inspiration from nature’s wisdom and patterns. A world where every individual is empowered to contribute to a brighter, more resilient future for all.

Mission

The world is on the brink of unprecedented challenges, from climate change and AI to social inequality. Our mission is to respond to these challenges by helping to bring about a collective cultural enlightenment. Through workshops, courses, gatherings, educational materials, podcasts, and immersive experiences, we sow the seeds of knowledge, enabling the flourishing of both individuals and communities.

We focus on these three areas:

Inner cultivation – The seeds of the garden

We believe that in many ways ‘(R)Evolution is an inside job’ and see deep self-exploration and self-transformation as necessary ingredients for overcoming our global challenges. We provide support for individual seedlings on their way to blossom into full-grown beautiful flowers, becoming more mindful, compassionate and wise. An example of our support is the Inner (R)Evolution course that combines the wisdom and meditative techniques of the ancient contemplative traditions of Buddhism and Daoism with the insights of modern psychology, neuroscience and philosophy.

Community-Building – The soil of the garden

Community is at the heart of everything we do. Our focus is on building both local and global communities and nurturing social environments. Creating this healthy ‘social soil’ involves cultivating wholesome group spaces characterised by trust, care and belonging. This social soil is not only important for building sustainable communities but is also essential for the growth of individual seedlings on their path of inner cultivation. Our goal is to create the conditions where we can grow and flourish together. An example of this work is the Berlin Microsolidarity Project.

Planetary coherence – Global cross-pollination

We realise that systemic problems need systemic solutions. We focus on raising our collective level of consciousness and increasing our global capacity for sense-making, choice-making and collective action. We create events and workshops in person and online to discuss and act on relevant topics for solving the meta-crisis. We are working on creating educational content like videos, podcasts, and articles aimed at collective transition towards a regenerative culture.

Values and ideals

Community

Margeret Wheatley writes: “Whatever the question, community is the answer!” The more we are in community the more true this statement rings. So a crucial goal of The Garden is to build community. Inspirations for this community come from Epicurus ideal of a garden (which is partly why we chose that name) where friends come together to philosophise, support each other and enjoy themselves. A second inspiration comes from the Buddhist idea of a sangha, a spiritual community focussed on mutual support. This focus on community is not only an end in itself but also a means toward the end of resilience and stability of the organisation, fully utilising the power of synergy and network effects.

Good projects

We only take on what we call good projects, which are projects that benefit the individual, the group and the community at large (both local and global). If a project is likely to harm either of these three groups, it will not be carried out. We have a high standard regarding the mental health and well-being of the individuals contributing to our organisation.

Psychological safety

We aim to create an environment which is psychologically safe, meaning that people feel free to express how they feel, especially regarding expressing criticism, asking “stupid” questions and showing vulnerability. High organisational psychological safety has been strongly correlated with better mental health of teams and also with higher effectiveness. All parts of The Garden are deliberately designed to foster high levels of psychological safety.

Equity and equality

We want to include and give all people the same opportunities, no matter their sex, gender, race or other distinguishing factor.

Scientific method and scientific ideals

The entire project can be seen as an ongoing experiment in which we aim to apply the scientific method to all areas of our organisation. This means that we continually go through cycles of observation, hypothesis, experimentation and evaluation and do so regarding our communication, meetings and relationships, our projects and workshops, our data management and documentation and our organisation as a whole. To do so we rely on the scientific ideals of validity, reliability and objectivity, as well as openness, curiosity and healthy scepticism.

Purpose before profits

We have not decided ultimately on our organisational legal entity but gravitate strongly towards a non-profit or a steward-owned organisation. In both cases the ultimate aim is not to maximise profits but to fulfil our vision and purpose.

Systemic and holistic approach

Our approach to the topics of interest is deeply grounded in systems theory, and the solutions we aim for are holistic in nature. This means considering as many aspects from as many perspectives as we can synthesising different insights whenever possible. To achieve this a collective, collaborative and community mindset is crucial.

Learning organisation and documentation

We aim to continuously improve and learn from our ongoing operations. This means conducting reviews and retrospectives in regular intervals and documenting every step of our projects to grow as an organisation and to enable others to replicate what we have done.

Open source and transparency

We value sharing information and making it freely available for others which applies to our findings, experimental protocols, internal processes etc. We intend to publish all our research freely under the creative commons license. We follow the transparency ideal from sociocracy which states to make all information publically available unless there is a strong reason not to.

Knowledge transfer

An important aim of The Garden is to inform the public about topics surrounding consciousness research and -culture. This includes creating educational content, reporting on our own research and about other interesting scientific findings and philosophical topics. This will be done in the form of lectures, podcasts, discussion rounds, hackathons, conferences, webinars, retreats etc.

Agile and sociocratic organisation

We work iteratively and incrementally and value agility and adaptability. Our modus operandi is inspired by sociocratic, agile and non-hierarchical structures and principles.

Fun and humour

A wise person once said: ”If it is not fun it is not sustainable”. Since we are interested in sustainable change a core principle of The Garden is to enjoy ourselves and have a good time together. This goes hand in hand with the ideal of humour and especially not taking ourselves too seriously.

Research ideals

Action research

We follow the ideal of action research which means that we seek to enable transformative change. We are taking action and doing research at the same time. These periods of action and research are followed by review and reflection. Then another more informed, updated iteration of action follows and the cycle continues. An example of this is the Berlin Microsolidarity Project, a workshop-based research which includes reviews and retrospectives that enable us to optimise our processes and materials.

Citizen science

We believe that we are all scientists at heart whether we already know it or not. We want to make the inner scientific mindset explicit and empower as many people as possible to explore themselves to become more content and self-efficacious. We believe that good things will come from making inner science and our research findings available to everyone.

Inner science

We see our mind as a kind of laboratory and our content of consciousness as a stream of observable data that we can learn to better notice, observe and understand in order to become more mindful, compassionate and wise. We are in line with recent findings of cognitive science telling us that both our minds and brains are highly plastic and that mental faculties, previously thought to be rather fixed, can be greatly improved with training. This seems to be the case for attention, mindfulness, metacognition, emotional states and regulation. With the refinement of these faculties comes the promise of making richer, more fine-grained observations within, to better understand our mental patterns and to ultimately emobody our highest ideals, becoming the change we want to see in the world. We want to empower as many people as possible to undergo this transformation in the most systematic, reliable and pleasant way possible. The ultimate goal is to raise our collective level of consciousness and accelerate the transition to a true consciousness culture (Bewusstseinskultur). Everything we do at The Garden is informed by this general vision.

Interdisciplinarity

We are a group of individuals with diverse scientific backgrounds and recognise the value of combining many different perspectives in order to produce truly transdisciplinary work. Perspectives we value and have some expertise in include: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, meditation and mindfulness practices, systems theory, complexity science, embodiment practices, teaching, coaching and consulting.

Combining first-person and third-person methods

When investigating states of consciousness, it is very rewarding to do so from a first- and third-person perspective. This means employing various techniques for directly exploring our own subjective states, such as meditation, mindfulness, attention training, etc. and at the same time using third-person measures to explore the correlates of these states. These correlates can be measured using EEG, fMRI, sonograms, heart rate variability, pulse, skin conductance etc.

We are researcher, participant and measuring device

Consciousness research is distinct from all other forms of research because the phenomena in question, states of consciousness, is subjective in nature. Each one of us has direct access to the data within their own minds. Thus all of us are both participant and researcher as well as the measuring device. At The Garden participants are thus seen as collaborative researchers. Furthremore, we test all of the projects we are running within ourselves and our core research group.