How We Define Research
The goal of our research is to establish a field for nonviolently inhabiting the Earth. Cooperation and trust are our guiding criteria. By researching the social, spiritual, sexual, ecological, technological and economic areas of life, we work on foundations for a possible new planetary culture. When we live in full trust and cooperation with each other, all life and the Earth, aligning with life’s self-healing powers, violence becomes impossible.
Trust and Cooperation
Tamera is a living laboratory. We’re developing social and ecological conditions in which violence ceases to exist because its underlying root causes have been dissolved.
Our inquiry is: how do we as humanity in the 21st century need to organize our societies so that trust and cooperation arise between children and parents, lovers, all generations, nationalities and cultures, as well as people and nature (plants, animals, etc.)?
This kind of research is a communitarian process of practice-based learning, i.e. trial and error, in which providing mutual feedback, communicating truthfully, reflecting and evaluating are key.
Human-focused research
We don’t separate the research object from the subject. Our deepest research object is ourselves. It’s human beings who have generated the problems of this world, which means we also have the ability to dissolve and heal them when we gain insight into what we’re doing and why.
As Dieter Duhm writes, “If one wants to know how humankind functions, one should learn how a group functions, for a group contains all the light and shadow sides of our human existence within it.”
Raising Consciousness
As we see it, violence results from unconscious habits of thinking and acting. Sabine Lichtenfels says, “Where there’s consciousness there can be no war.”
That’s why research, as we understand it, is a process of raising consciousness. We push the edge of reflective consciousness further and further into those realms so far governed by our collective trauma. Through this phenomenological approach (studying the development of human consciousness and self-awareness) we can see where human social dynamics allow truth among people to emerge and thereby generate lasting trust and healing.
Our research involves generating new experiences and studying the many indicators for the existence of a universal healing matrix around the world, then collectively observing and gaining insight from them. The ability to translate insight into intersubjective language and connect the dots between diverse experiences from various fields into a coherent, sound worldview is what affects sustainable change.
We’ve found that when we truly shift from fear to trust, from exploitation to cooperation, life responds differently. All beings react with gratitude, opening and the mutual offer of cooperation when we enter into full, immediate contact with the living. We’re in a fundamentally different empirical state outside the pattern of fear and violence than in it. This difference is what orients the direction of our research – in all areas.
Cooperation with the Academic World
We’re aware our research doesn’t necessarily fulfill conventional academic epistemological (study of knowledge) approaches. That’s why we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with universities and researchers interested in scientifically documenting our research.
We have entered into such collaborations already, for example with Fundação da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FFCUL) on how our water retention landscape can restore the water cycle and reduce vulnerability to droughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, please reach out to the leaders of each respective research area.