Know Thyself
E147 - Zach Bush: 6 Powerful Lessons Nature Teaches Us About Being Human
Tue, 20 May 2025
Zach Bush unpacks how moving from individualism to interconnectedness can heal both ourselves and the planet. This episode delves into breaking the cycle of consumerism, remembering the innate intelligence of life, and embracing the changes that come with personal growth. Through powerful metaphors-like death as a way home to ourselves-and reflections on the seasonality of life, Zach reveals how stress and challenge are essential for true growth. This conversation offers a hopeful vision for the future and practical insights for coming home to ourselves and the earth.Try Pique Life tea and save 20% for life & get a free frother:https://www.piquelife.com/KnowThyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro1:39 From Individualism to Interconnectedness 7:12 Breaking the Cycle of Consumerism12:33 Remembering Our Innate Intelligence17:52 The Transformation Zach Has Been Going Through21:45 Metaphor of Death to Bring Us Home to Ourselves25:54 Embracing the Seasonality of Life33:30 Ad: PiqueLife36:40 Relationship Between Stress and Growth39:49 Unlocking Our Unique Dharma44:58 Creating Space for Stillness & Seeing the Beauty of Life53:18 Prevailing Message for Humanity57:47 Fear of Death Limits Our Capacity for Life1:03:00 Prediction for the Next 5 Years1:08:30 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/zachbushmd/https://zachbushmd.komi.io/https://intelligenceofnature.com/?_ef_transaction_id=&oid=1&affid=460https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX
Chapter 1: What does interconnectedness mean in today's society?
When you get 10 birds in a flock, they line up in a V. But you put 10,000 birds together, you start to express sacred geometries at the scales of a kilometer. This phenomenon of becoming creator is already inherent in your biology. Everything's temporary. There is no such thing as death. There's only rebirth. There's not a such thing as an endpoint to nature. There's only the recreation.
As we go into seasonality and as we start to embrace the friction, we're going to grow quickly. We need to stop trying to escape to the sacredness, and we need to start to realize that every place is sacred, and we need to start to manifest that sacredness within every part of our bodies.
And if we do, the frictions that are currently killing us or creating so much pain will diminish to just the change of direction.
My friend, Zach Bush, welcome back to the show.
I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you, Andre, for having me.
I thought as it's very in alignment with your work and also my area of passion as a framework for this conversation to pull from some core themes of nature's wisdom and how there are so many parallels to unlocking our inner nature, discovering that, embodying in it, embracing it, living in it, and how that can contribute to us living in harmony.
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Chapter 2: How can we break the cycle of consumerism?
And so the first one that would be thrilled to get your kind of framework and understanding around is We live in perhaps the most individualistic culture to have ever existed. And we look throughout all nature as it's a complex ecosystem where interdependence is the natural state of being in existence from all life.
Yet the human mind is the one thing that loves to believe it's a separate individual and has the capacity to do so.
And so when you think about the sort of relational reciprocity and interdependence as a way of being throughout all life and living life as an offering and how we can give in that way, what are your thoughts on how we can move from living as a separate individual identity to an interdependent being and recognizing that?
It may be just lexicon, but I've been moving away from... The word interdependence in some ways in our work around large-scale regeneration, the scale of continents, and then down to the microscopic level at the single-celled organism. But the concept, I think, is absolutely spot on, which is this phenomenon in which a single cell in isolation becomes cancer.
A monocrop over 10 million hectares destroys the intelligence and life force within the biosphere within that area. And so certainly isolation or monoculture, the monotony of the way in which humans move typically is to destroy biodiversity and try to create a scaled version of a monopoly or monoculture. That that era needs to end.
But our understanding of what emerges as an alternative to that or by nature's design has been shifting. And so I'm blessed to be helping a group of us come off the ground with the Institute of Natural Law for the last couple of years. And we've been really investigating that. What is the systems of natural law that determine physics, biology, and ultimately human systems?
And the first line of natural law is ultimately sovereignty. And I think that that's what we've been reaching for. And perhaps mistakenly, using this word independent or freedom as a concept. And there is no such thing as independence, as you say. Independence leads to isolation, isolation to chaos. And so that's the second law of thermodynamics.
And so ultimately, this concept of connectivity is critical, but there may be a slight difference between the concept of interdependence, the word dependence suggesting that one thing can't exist without the other, to a concept of sovereignty, And then once you get sovereignty at the atomic level or the cellular level, you immediately create polarity.
And so an electron will always have the proton, the proton will always have the neutron. And so there's these constellations of charges that form within the matrix of our physical reality that are held together by the sovereignty of each individual. And no point does the proton probably feel dependent upon the neutron. Instead, it's joy to share space with the neutron.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of embracing death and rebirth?
Chapter 4: How does stress contribute to personal growth?
Chapter 5: What role does seasonality play in our lives?
Chapter 6: How does nature teach us about our innate intelligence?
But our understanding of what emerges as an alternative to that or by nature's design has been shifting. And so I'm blessed to be helping a group of us come off the ground with the Institute of Natural Law for the last couple of years. And we've been really investigating that. What is the systems of natural law that determine physics, biology, and ultimately human systems?
And the first line of natural law is ultimately sovereignty. And I think that that's what we've been reaching for. And perhaps mistakenly, using this word independent or freedom as a concept. And there is no such thing as independence, as you say. Independence leads to isolation, isolation to chaos. And so that's the second law of thermodynamics.
And so ultimately, this concept of connectivity is critical, but there may be a slight difference between the concept of interdependence, the word dependence suggesting that one thing can't exist without the other, to a concept of sovereignty, And then once you get sovereignty at the atomic level or the cellular level, you immediately create polarity.
And so an electron will always have the proton, the proton will always have the neutron. And so there's these constellations of charges that form within the matrix of our physical reality that are held together by the sovereignty of each individual. And no point does the proton probably feel dependent upon the neutron. Instead, it's joy to share space with the neutron.
You know, there's this sense of connectivity as a result of the polarity. And so as we think about that as social systems or human design, It inspires us to think past the concepts of independence or freedom towards this concept of sovereignty of each individual.
And once you have sovereignty, then instead of polarization, we get polarity and understanding that your opposite is actually really critical to your stability and your self-expression ultimately. And so while you're not dependent on that other thing, sodium is always sodium. If there's chloride, not chloride, sodium is always sodium.
But if you can give it an opportunity to bond to chloride, now it's salt. And you get this beautiful thing that is necessary for oceans to live and for life to breathe and all these beautiful things. But at no point does one lose the identity of the other. And the concept of interdependence
runs the risk of us believing that there's one world government or one world system or you should sacrifice yourself for the greater whole. And so that's the shadow side of this kind of understanding that we're all kind of moving towards it. Like, all right, isolation is bad. What's the alternative?
And so I think the concept of interdependence is good, but maybe we can nuance it into this concept of interconnection or constellations of sovereignty. And that will...
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between sovereignty and interdependence?
Chapter 8: How can we create space for stillness and beauty in life?
And so that intelligence is something that was called quorum sensing at the biologic level. And so when you get enough diversity or enough inputs into a single space, you start to see these really beautiful things that are far more spectacular than the sum of its parts. And so it's this true synergy where there's one plus one equals four, not two, you know.
And so that synergy of the centropic nature of multiple connections creates the beauty of something like a murmuration. And this is where I think we have fundamentally broken our contribution, moving from contributor back to consumer in our human systems as we break those interrelationships of tens of thousands and we turn it into a nuclear family.
And now you're a husband, you're a wife, and those are your children. There's your white picket fence. Everything inside this fence is yours. Everything outside of it is not yours. And so now you've isolated yourself from the 99.999% of nature that is the Mother Earth that was intending to be your mother in the first place.
And in that concept of ownership as a solution to scarcity, we create more scarcity. And so the murmuration of a bird is showing us if we would just let go of the belief that we're not protected and that nature's against us and we need to consume so that there's enough, letting go of that and increasing the number of connections, we return perhaps at the local level to a village model.
But we're starting to have the technologies at our fingertips that are going to remind us of what it feels like to be wholly connected to the whole organism of humanity. And so cell phones and, you know, the tech world, Zoom, whatever it is, is leading us back to this possibility that there's more beauty with more connection. And right now we're relying on very low vibration technology.
5G networks compared to what happens in a human cell is... Like we haven't even reached kindergarten. The technology inside of a human body is so far beyond our comprehension. And so when we all have this moment of amazement when a man comes along and says, I've filled a steel tube with solid rocket fuel and I lit it on fire and it shot up into the air and then it fell back on earth.
And everybody's like, oh my God, that's so genius. We should put billions of dollars into that project. Meanwhile, there's a woman that is undernourished in the squatter villages of Philippines who creates a silent space inside of her called a womb. She surrenders that to the divine.
She blinds herself to the very process that's going to unfold within her with progesterone so that her immune system itself can't even see what's about to unfold.
fully surrendering that to creator and this creative force takes a single human cell and turns it into 70 trillion human cells that self-organize into a body of a child that nine months later somehow emerges from her body quantum entangled with a identity that has been here since the beginning of time and there's no headlines
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