What is Syntropy?
“Living reality is constantly growing, expanding, cultivating and consolidating more biodiversity and density of life, for life.”
Souvereign
Syntropy is the word for what life is doing, in the soil under your feet and in the body you are reading this with, and it has been doing it the whole time, long before any of us had a name for it.
A word for what you have already watched
You have watched a bare patch of ground green over. It may have been a corner of the garden you let go of for a season, or a roadside cut, or a paddock after the cattle came off, and when you looked again the grass had come, and after the grass something taller, and the soil under it had gone dark and soft and smelled of itself again. Life organised that by itself, gathering back into more life with a structure of its own making, and the quiet yes you felt in your body while you watched it is the first thing I mean by Syntropy. That felt knowing is the ground this whole site stands on, and it is the door into the first of the Three Schools that Sophia’s teaching flows into.
Syntropy is life’s tendency to gather itself into more life. Syn, together, and tropos, a turning: life turns toward itself and gathers, concentrating and organising and carrying itself forward into greater density and greater diversity of living form, and it does this in the deepening of soil, in the thickening of a forest, in the closing of a wound and in the way a group of people finds its function together. It is the movement under every living thing, and as I said it to a room of growers in Bali, “Nothing ever leaves Syntropy. The realm of Syntropy covers the entire scope of all of life.”
Fantappiè, Szent-Györgyi and the soil
The word is older than my use of it. The Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappiè named it sintropia in 1942, when he found in the equations of physics a second family of solutions that run toward concentration, order and life, and the Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose Nobel came from the work that isolated vitamin C, reached for the same word in 1977 for the drive he saw in living matter to perfect itself. The physics and the biochemistry gave the word its credentials. For me it arrived through the soil, through Syntropic Agroforestry and the farmers in Brazil who read a forest closely enough to plant one on purpose, and when I met it there it felt like a homecoming: “It was never something that I learned new. It was like, wow, my God. Intuitively I knew this all along, and now I have the full scope of all the language to actually read these landscapes.” The study of Syntropy is the study of nature, and the land handed me the word as a living metric I could measure everything else against.
Reading it on the edge of a forest
Stand at the edge of any forest and the pattern reads itself to you. There is the tall canopy, and under it the mid-storey, and under that the shrubs and the grasses and the ground cover, every layer holding a different share of the light, and out past the last trunk the grass is already thickening and the first pioneer shrubs are coming up through it, so that in ten years’ time the edge of the forest stands somewhere further out, the forest having grown out again and again. That is succession, and it runs in one direction. Look at the soil while you are there, because “when you see bare soil, life is leaving that environment”, and the first thing a living system does with bare soil is cover it. What arrives to cover it we were taught to call a weed, and the grass that comes up prickly in a paddock is doing exactly what it says it is doing, a grass that wants to stay in the system and so makes itself a guinea grass, as prickly as it takes.
This is the creed the whole practice rests on, and I have said it the same way for ten years: “Everything alive is performing a function with purpose, and you can question the function. And if you’re willing, life will allow you to discover the mysteries, and they are beautiful.” The volunteer in the garden bed and the pest on the leaf and the tree dropping its lower branches in the shade are each answering a question the system asked, and once you learn to ask them what they are doing here, the forest becomes legible, and so does everything else that lives.
Entropy, placed where it lives
The question I am asked most often is where entropy comes into it, and through the study of Syntropy the answer has become simple. The second law of thermodynamics describes a closed box, and life lives under an open sky with the sun arriving every morning, so that the forest keeps accumulating energy and matter and complexity year on year. Where I do find entropy at work is in the idea phase, in the mind of a human being who has stopped asking what life is doing and started imposing a fantasy on it, and I will keep saying it the way I said it in the course: “Entropy doesn’t exist as an active force in nature, it is only active as a behavioral distortion in human behavior.” Scarcity and waste and the monoculture that needs feeding from a bag are human ideas carried out on the land, and the land answers every one of them with grass.
Carrying the same word into a human being
The same noun travels inward, and this is where the word turns from an agricultural term into the one I live by. A human being is a living system, and a living system gathers itself into more life the moment its conditions allow, which is why I came to say that “trauma is like locked up nutrients in the soil. They’re locked up, they’re not free.” A reaction that keeps returning, a tightness that arrives before you have finished the sentence, a part of you that goes quiet at a certain tone of voice, each of these is performing a function with purpose, the way the guinea grass is, and it will keep performing it until the function completes. The places where a young life first locked up in this way are few, and they are where the five primary imprints wait. So the questions I bring to a forest are the questions I bring to a person. What is this part doing here? What is it performing? What did it arrive to protect? And what would it be free to become once the nutrient is unlocked?
Ten years of asking what life is doing
For me it began with hands in the ground. “I had a very industrial mindset and I’ve really entered into a Syntropic mind song that isn’t about definition and boxes and rules. It’s more about, well, what’s life doing?” I am still a student of all of this, another mammal very excited about growing life, and ten years of asking that one question has carried the word from the soil into the way I read a dream, the way I sit with someone across eight to twelve weeks, and the way I understand what a culture is for. The field notes from the land went into The Growing Ground, the writing that grew from them lives in the School of Syntropy, and the practice is now gathering, humbly, at the Centre for Syntropy taking shape in Bali.
And when the word has to meet a human being who is ready to have it meet them, my one-to-one work sits exactly there, restoring the conditions so the gathering resumes of its own accord. You have watched a bare patch of ground green over, and that is Syntropy, already at work in you.