By Rosana Jotta — Instituto Rosa da Terra
Here we read life through the lens of Systemic Intelligence.
Hello!
Before we are cultural, we are nature. “Ontological” condition means it is not a choice, a belief, or an approach. It is what we are before any decision about being. “Ecological” because it anchors us in the natural world before anchoring us in our relationships.
Before we learn norms, values, and social roles, we are living organisms that need other organisms to survive.
This is not a philosophical statement. It is a biological fact, and it is the starting point of everything Biosystemics proposes.
We are a gregarious species. Not by choice, not by convenience, not by cultural construction. By constitution.
Our nervous system evolved within groups, in specific natural environments, in radical dependence on bonds, on territory, on climate, on other bodies.
Interdependence is not a value to be cultivated. It is the condition that precedes us, and one that does not prevent the development of the cooperative autonomy we seek as humanity.
And it is precisely for this reason that it needs to be understood, rather than celebrated naively.
What It Means to Be Radically Interdependent
Stephen Porges, with Polyvagal Theory, mapped something that seems simple but carries profound consequences: the human autonomic nervous system evolved specifically to detect safety or threat in relational environments.
And what environments are not relational? How many individuals throughout human history managed to survive relating only to non-human natural entities?
We are not organisms that later learned to live in groups. We are organisms whose physiology was shaped by group living, over millions of years.
This means that the relational field is not external to the organism. It is part of the conditions that regulate what that living organism can do.
In our case, this involves learning, creating, deciding, trusting, and distrusting. And all of it depends on the state our nervous system assumes within the field in which it is embedded.
Humberto Maturana arrived at the same conclusion by another path.
For him, love, in the ontological sense rather than the moral one, is the emotion that founds the human social. Not one emotion among others, but the biological condition that makes coexistence and mutual development possible. Without it, what exists is not society. It is organized coercion.
The radical interdependence that Biosystemics describes is therefore not only ecological in the environmental sense, though it is also that. It is ecological in the deeper sense: we are part of a web of relationships from which we cannot separate ourselves without consequences for what we are and for what we are capable of becoming.
The Necessary Precaution
Recognizing this interdependence without consciously developing it can produce the opposite of what is sought.
When interdependence is lived unconsciously, without the capacity to observe one’s own patterns within the field, it does not produce collective intelligence.
It produces rigid social systems: structures that appear external and superior to the individual, structures in which the individual feels held hostage. This is where the central precaution of Biosystemics resides, particularly in the face of power relations that demand fusion and threaten with exclusion.
Recognizing that we are radically interdependent is not enough. It is necessary to develop the capacity to observe that interdependence in operation within oneself, in one’s own reactions, in one’s own patterns of response to the field.
Without this capacity, awareness of interdependence can become yet another form of dissolving individual authorship rather than expanding it.
Metacognition. The Movement That Makes Collective Intelligence Possible
Daniel Siegel demonstrated clinically that the capacity to observe one’s own mental, emotional, and bodily processes, what he calls mindsight, is not an ornament of human development.
It is the mechanism through which integration becomes possible. Without it, the nervous system repeats known patterns because it has no way to observe its own functioning from within.
This capacity has a more precise name in the context of Systemic Intelligence: dynamic metacognition. Not reflection on experience after it has passed, but the capacity to observe one’s own processes as they happen, within the relational field, in real time.
This distinction matters. Subsequent reflection is analysis.
Dynamic metacognition is presence with awareness, the capacity to be in the field and simultaneously observe how the field is operating within oneself.
Maturana offers the foundation for understanding why this capacity is transformative: the closed autopoietic system only transforms from its own internal conditions. No external perturbation determines the change. What determines it is the internal organization of the system that receives the perturbation.
Developing metacognition means, in this sense, expanding the internal conditions that make individual reorganization possible, and therefore collective reorganization as well, through the reshaping of the institutions we create and the collective agreements that organize us as humanity.
From Individual Emotional Intelligence to Collective Intelligence
Emotional intelligence, as it has been popularized, is essentially individual: the capacity to recognize and regulate one’s own emotions, and to read the emotions of others.
It is a real and necessary achievement. But it remains at the level of the individual who becomes more skilled within the field.
Systemic Intelligence proposes a movement beyond: that metacognitions developed in the field, not in isolation but in the concrete experience of relationships, create something qualitatively different.
Not the sum of emotionally intelligent individuals, but a field where the collective capacity to read patterns, name dynamics, and generate new responses becomes available to the group as a whole.
Siegel points in this direction when he describes interpersonal integration: the capacity to honor the differentiation of each part while cultivating the connection between them.
Porges provides the physiological foundation: it is the state of neurophysiological safety, what he calls social engagement, that makes this integration without fusion possible, this connection without loss of self.
What Biosystemics adds is the understanding that this field does not emerge spontaneously when well-intentioned individuals gather.
It emerges when each part develops the capacity to observe itself within the field, and to recognize, with precision and without romanticism, that it is simultaneously the author and the product of the pattern in operation.
Nature Before Culture, and Then, Culture With Awareness
We are nature before we are culture. But we are also the species that can observe this condition, and from that observation, participate more consciously and more freely in the fields we inhabit and create.
This is the promise of Biosystemic Education: not to produce individuals better adapted to existing systems, but to develop the metacognitive capacity that allows each person to recognize the patterns operating within themselves, between themselves and others, and in the fields they inhabit, and to act from that awareness.
Not to escape interdependence. To inhabit it with authorship.
Warmly,
Rosana Jotta
Rosana Jotta is a facilitator specializing in Boundary Conditions, Systemic Intelligence, and Biosystemic Education, with over 20 years of experience. She is a Boundary Architect, an educator (UFU), and a Systemic Constellator trained at IMAHOM, with participation in a seminar with Bert Hellinger and training in Integrative Community Therapy through ABRATECOM. She is the founder of Instituto Rosa da Terra and facilitates transformation processes for people seeking to break free from repetitive patterns and live with greater awareness, clarity, lightness, and success. Discover her Training Programs, Mentoring, and group or individual sessions, available in person or online.