Journey to the Jaguar - Remembering the Field in a World of Minds

Unbounding relationality with light through the cracks of rational thought

I froze. The air thickened as a jaguar stared at me through the jungle shadows.

In that eternal moment something ancient moved between. A knowing. Not that I was being watched, but that I was being remembered. I wasn’t separate, I never was.

That moment in the jungle of Palenque, Mexico, in late December, 2012 is etched into my being.

Moonlight filtered through the canopy, guiding me after a meditation ritual. Patterns of circles and triangles I had drawn in the sand, echoing ancient geometries. The Adi Mantra still hummed through my chest:

Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo

I bow to the Creative Wisdom, I bow to the Divine Teacher within.

As fear crept in, I chanted aloud. The mantra was me.

That night, I followed the sound of a waterfall to the river where we had leapt from rocks into raw and rushing water earlier that day. Then the growl. The gleam of those eyes. The jaguar.

I had been raised in a world that taught me intelligence was something enclosed within my own mind. An emergent property of complexity in some linear causal chain. I had internalised the Western paradigm and belief that rationality, analysis, and human cognition were the highest forms of intelligence. But in that jungle, intelligence was something relational. Felt, sensed, co-emergent in the spaces between. A field that is, through and beyond any “I” or “us”.

As I reached the river, I stepped into the rushing water, feeling it cleanse more than my skin. It washed away residues of a lifetime of conditioning, a worldview that had imprisoned my understanding of intelligence in rationality alone.

As I made my way back, a glowing purple light streaked the sky.

I recalled what Omar, my mystic and often cryptic friend, said to me before I departed on that journey to the jaguar: "Someone will be chosen when the purple light touches the sky." I didn’t know what it meant when he said it and he said he didn’t either. But as the violet hue bathed the jungle, I understood something deeper. That it wasn’t about being chosen. It was about being invited. To witness. To feel and sense into the ineffable. To be remembered.

This was a little black kitten that nonchalantly sat on the path in front of me as I wandered amidst the ancient and sacred ruins of Palenque. And later in the evening the fractal familiar stared at it’s own reflection in the jungle mirrors.

The spirit of Nassim Taleb sits on my shoulder right now as I type this, laughing at me saying “fool”… but from what bounds does the fool dream and be?

From bounded rationality to unbounding relationality

Let me offer a frame I’ve been playing with:

Rationality draws its limits at the edge of the mind.

Relationality draws its bounds at the edge of the self.

As if they were ever separate at all. But that’s another post.

For much of my life I had operated within a framework shaped by bounded rationality. This idea that decision-making is limited by cognitive constraints, incomplete information, and urgency. I had for a decent chunk of my early adulthood accepted the premise that intelligence was about optimising within those limits, that reasoning was the pinnacle of knowing. I had sometimes walked through the streets of Sydney CBD after uni at night. Telling myself "everyone has the same capacity for reason" as I wandered and wondered with strangers and those sleeping rough for yarns about life, struggles, mental health and everything in between.

But what if the true limitation is more about our relational bandwidth?

Bounded rationality assumes knowledge lives in individual minds. That we think, compute, choose. And bounded relationality constrains how we experience knowing altogether. It frames intelligence as something linear and measurable, severed from intuition, emergence, or field.

But my intuited sense of this truth didn’t begin in the annals of philosophy books even though I did take a sojourn there.

It began in lived experience.

Fractures and frequencies

I was born into a hippy Christian cult called the Children of God (also known as The Family), and we moved between communes before my mother fled from my abusive father with us 6 little human Earthians. Moving between women’s refuges before finally getting government housing. And I remember when I was a child I felt I was a receiving antennae for the universe. Hiding these weird little “knowings” from everyone around me out of fear I was just “crazy”.

By the time I was 14, I had been expelled from school and was told by some of my teachers at that time that I would either end up in prison or dead before 20. Pretty brutal feedback for a young little Earthian.

For a few years, I actually believed them.

In my teens I fell into a world of drug use, crime, self-loathing and violence. Despite having some grounding working with my uncle and artisan builder slash philosopher grandfather in construction. But when heroin started taking my friends, and almost took me, I chose another path. I left those social circles and poured my energy into bodyboarding, immersing myself in the ocean's rhythms, where I was learning to be with something greater than myself guiding me. This cultivated a deeper sense of wonder and at 19. I started reading again. Bringing science textbooks into the building site lunch room. Captivated by geology, evolutionary biology, human physiology, and what I saw as this extraordinary biochemical and electromagnetic system that is the human body. At 24, I returned to study, finishing my high school certificate at TAFE and finding my place at the University of Technology, Sydney, where I studied communications with a major in social inquiry.

During this period of life I was expanding the bounds of my rationality.

I devoured material on neuroscience, psychology, political economy, and the mechanics of power. I explored how media and propaganda shape perception, how surveillance alters behaviour, how digital infrastructures shape human societies. From some foundational expansion events and existential crises with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s "The Social Construction of Reality", Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" and Bruno Latour’s “Reassembling the Social”. Through to weaving meaning with Foucault, McLuhan, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Haraway, Habermas, Descarte, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Bateson. To dancing with Fuller, Tzu, Huxley, Orwell, Said, Grof, Watts and Wittgenstein. (If you’re reading this not knowing of any of these human Earthians. Go easy into it, or just don’t go into those wabbit wholes at all as knowledge of these sorts is a tad overrated. If you have traversed these frames, that’s a different picture you’ll be imagining next.)

Sometimes I’d imagine myself in communion with these human Earthians, Elders, sitting around the campfire, listening to and laughing with the fractal patterns that just reveal the same simple truths of what just IS, over and over. A former kid from houso, sitting in circle discussing the holographic nature of reality... yeah my teachers from early high school would be beyond disbelief at that one.

So as you can now imagine, university for me was part of an ongoing and progressive revealing of the relationality of the universe. And a process of rewiring my understanding of reality.

But what it didn’t teach me was how to unbind because now much of my sensing was, still, “thinking”.

Expanding the field of knowing

The real transformation for me came through embodied experience. From deep integrative work over 20 years.

The ocean taught me intelligence is in attunement. Three decades of surfing and bodyboarding trained me to listen to waves, respond to shifts in energy, surrender to forces greater than myself.

Mountain biking forced me to trust my body’s intelligence, to sense terrain through movement, to make split-second decisions not with logic but with deep knowing of the grooves and rhythms of the trails.

Sitting with Elders taught me that wisdom isn’t transmitted through words alone but through presence, patience and listening through all the senses not just the ears.

Fatherhood has reshaped my relationality, teaching me to learn to feel before I speak, to listen to what isn’t said, to hold space for conscious expansion beyond instruction and spacetime itself.

Plant medicine and shamanic rituals in Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Costa Rica dissolved the illusion of separateness entirely, showing me intelligence and wisdom that was ancient, collective, kin-centrically ancestral, and deeply entangled.

Praxis in my work has taught me that the one of the most fundamental organising principles of the universe is play. Echoing what I had cerebrally learned from Watts many years before it was viscerally brought alive in my bones through lived experience over the past 15 years.

Forgiving the human Earthian (my biological father) who had probably hurt me the most taught me deep down that to love is also to forgive those who've wounded you the most.

This and more has help me to sense that relational intelligence is about re/cognising the agency in all things, not just humans. It’s helped me in shifting from knowing as mastery to knowing as attunement. To seeing cognition itself as an entangled field. Where coherence with wisdom, is also about being in relation with the landscapes of the world, the rhythms of life, and the often silent exchange between beings and beingness.

How bounded rationality traps us

The world is entangled in crises in large part because we have confined intelligence to a bounded rational frame, while neglecting the unbounded relationality that just, IS. We assume we can think our way out of collapse while remaining disconnected and ontologically separate from the very systems we seek to change.

The bounded frames have led many to believe:

• That we can solve climate change with technical fixes, rather than addressing our severed relationships with the living world we are part of.

• That governance should optimise for efficiency and control, instead of trust, reciprocity, and care.

• That markets are rational, even as they extract from future generations and decimate ecosystems in a self terminating logic.

• That AI and automation will "enhance intelligence", while stripping decision making from embodied, ethical, ancestral and relational contexts.

We are not suffering from a lack of knowledge, we are suffering from a lack of relational attunement. A deeper coherence with the larger fields of wisdom we have separated ourselves from in some collective amnesia.

Unbounding together

To move into coherence with what IS, we need to unbind from many of these frames. To sit in circle, fire together and rewire together. Finding ways to break free from bounded relationality and the illusion that we are isolated minds navigating a world of objects void of the inseparableness of our participation. Maybe even retiring the specious notion that the “qualia” of consciousness is computable. Maybe, then, what emerges from the imaginal is something that is felt into and co-constituted together with all our Earthian kin on this planet. It is this orientation that is much more attuned to our deeper ancestral roots before the stories of separation wove their memetic webs and colonised our being.

So I invite you:

• To listen beyond words, re/cognising the intelligence of silence, pause and presence.

• To relearn how to feel into relationship as an epistemic act and way of knowing.

• To design spaces, governance, and technologies that foster interconnected intelligence and wisdom rather than some journey of optimised computation and value extraction.

• To move from separation to participation, from thinking to sensing, from bounded to a more expansive relationality.

Like holding a superposition of paradoxical beliefs as an orientation. The jaguar knew this. The jungle knew this.

And so do you.

Because to unbound our relationality is to sense into this even when we are scared of losing ourselves and the "I" we have been taught to see at the centre of everything.

With heart,

{m3}

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What was a moment when you remembered you were never separate?

Drop it in the comments. Let’s unbind together.

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P.S. Maybe Chalmers is just peering out from a bounded relational frame. The hard problem? Consciousness forgetting itself. Or maybe just playing hide and seek… 🤷🏼‍♂️

P.S.S. A message to the future I rediscovered when reviewing my journals to write this transmission.

—Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

And so be like water. Be the field. Because you are.