The Garden of UTOK: Part I
This blog was authored by Marcia Gralha, M.A.
Take a moment to close your eyes and picture your ideal garden. What do you see? Trees, flowers, vibrant colors? Can you hear the gentle sound of water, maybe from a fountain or a creek? Is it neatly landscaped or does it embrace a wilder kind of beauty? Is it more like a meditative sanctuary or a gathering spot? Is anyone else there with you? Let this image take shape and notice how it feels to step into it. This deeply personal vision is uniquely yours to access, shaped up by your unique mental architecture. Yet, like a fractal, it resonates universally as part of a practice as old as human civilization.
Throughout history, gardens have served as bridges between nature and human intention, reflecting shared narratives and values of various traditions. From simple subsistence vegetable patches to the artistic grandiosity of European landscape gardens and the stillness of the Japanese Zen garden, these spaces symbolize of our attempts to bring order and meaning to the natural world. Claude Monet, who painted a number of magnificent impressionist gardens, considered his home garden in Giverny, France, his “most beautiful masterpiece.”
The UTOK Garden is such a space within, UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. It complements the system with a mythical aesthetic dimension that traditional academic psychology, where UTOK was born, could not provide. UTOK’s core mission is to mend the knowledge fragmentation of our time with a new coherent naturalistic worldview, one that helps us understand the world and our place within it. The Garden is central to this vision, as it represents UTOK’s synthesis of two often opposing forces in Western knowledge systems: the scientific and humanistic sensibilities. This 3-part blog series explores the Garden’s role in UTOK, from its philosophical implications to its functional elements and its symbolism as a guiding metamodern archetype for navigating the challenges of the 21st century with coherence and adaptability.
The UTOK Garden: A Knowledge Vector for a Scientific-Humanistic Worldview.
The concept of the Garden came to life in 2016 during a conference on “Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Self,” twenty years after the initial set of insights — Justification Systems Theory and the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System — had been realized. Initially named “Garden of UTUA,” the Garden’s original description read:
“The word UTUA (pronounced ə tü ä’) comes from the combination of “UT” and “UA”, where UT stands for the unified theory of psychology and UA stands for a unified approach to psychotherapy. The Garden is an artistic representation of a system of knowledge that offers a novel way to unify modern science, psychology, and philosophy into a coherent scientific humanistic worldview. The Garden is scientific in the sense that it offers a map of the universe that is consistent with modern scientific knowledge, from quantum mechanics to sociology. It is humanistic in the sense that it embraces value-based living, meaning making, creative expression, and the concept of the sacred. As such, the Garden provides a place for the two cultures of the academy, the sciences and the humanities, to come together in a mutually inspiring dialectical dance.”
Central to that conference were questions that define our time: How do we effectively educate our children in a multicultural landscape to enable them to flourish individually and collectively? How can we be good ancestors for future generations? What values should guide us in fostering adaptive living amid global upheaval?
UTOK argues that, to answer those questions, we must first clarify three interconnected issues: What is nature, how is it known by humans and how should we relate to it? Who are we within it, as individuals, cultural collectives, and humanity as a whole? What shared values should orient our collective journey across time, especially now as we enter the Digital Global Age?
Of course, those are tricky questions to answer. In our age of chaotic fragmented pluralism, facts about reality and value-laden beliefs often feel divorced, scattered across divided academic, political, and cultural landscapes in a digital global context. UTOK claims our knowledge systems are fragmented because of something called the Enlightenment Gap. This refers to the failure of modern knowledge systems to clarify the relationship between matter and mind, and between objective knowledge, subjective experiences, and our socially constructed realities.
As modern science advanced during the Enlightenment, it provided humanity with much refined knowledge about the material world. However, it failed to include a coherent picture of the mental and social realms within its scientific worldview. The consequence has been theoretical confusion around core aspects of the human condition, such as consciousness, mind, and behavior. This is manifested in philosophical dilemmas like the mind-body problem, and in problematic dichotomies such as nature versus nurture and science versus humanism.
The UTOK Garden functions as a symbolic place for transcending these divides, offering a scientific-humanistic worldview that can effectively interrelate our subjective experiences, our cultural narratives, and the objective knowledge of modern science. This vision aligns with C.P. Snow’s (1959) critique of the “two culture” divide between science and the humanities in academia, which he described as a loss to society’s practical, intellectual, and creative potential — domains he saw as inseparable. In the UTOK Garden, the practical, the intellectual, and the creative can indeed be properly related, honoring both its distinctions and bridging points. In it, scientific understanding and humanistic meaning-making inform one another in a dialectical dance.
Bridging Knowledge Vectors
Now, let’s return to the mental image of your ideal garden. This image feels intimate and private, a subjective vision only you can directly access. Yet, you can describe its elements, — trees, paths, colors — well enough such that others can picture a very similar garden. After all, this private image is, in part, shaped by language and the intersubjective beliefs and values embedded in your cultural context and worldview. Now take a minute and think about how science would describe both a real garden (e.g., the sun that shines electromagnetic radiation on the organisms and animals in it) and the neurobiological activity that supports your subjective experience (e.g., examining an fMRI while you imagine this garden,) This highlights the fact that your subjective direct experience, its intersubjective cultural transmission through language, and its empirical, objective assessment via the methods of science are vastly different entities.
These three epistemologies are represented in UTOK as the three foundational ways of knowing. Each offers distinct insights and operates in qualitatively different ways. UTOK represents these vectors through its three core pillars:
- The iQuad Coin represents subjective knowing, emphasizing the unique, idiographic experience of individuals. The base of this knowledge vector is your phenomenology; that is, your direct experience of the world, such as when you open your eyes in the morning. Such direct experience is also associated with your particular named identity and what is intertwined with it, such as your relationships, roles, and activities.
- The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System represents objective knowing, offering a layered map of emergent complexification in nature. This objective vector is grounded in modern empirical natural science (MENS), emerging from Galileo’s frame of science as mathematical, generalizable mapping of observable behaviors in the world. The ToK System organizes our knowledge of this vector into five ontological layers: the Energy-Information Implicate Order, the Matter-Object layer, the Life-Organism layer, the Mind-Animal layer, and finally the Culture-Person layer.
- The Garden symbolizes intersubjective knowing, encompassing the socially constructed knowledge systems that coordinate human groups. The intersubjective vector is constituted by the shared roles, rules, and worldviews that make up the Culture-Person plane of existence. In UTOK, these are viewed as emerging out of systems of justification.
The Role of Justification Systems in the Garden
So how does this intersubjective knowledge emerge and spread across human groups? The postmodern turn in knowledge systems, responding to the perceived insufficiencies of modernity, provided a key insight to this question by clarifying how human groups construct social realities through the generation of shared knowledge. Berger and Luckman’s 1967 work, The Social Construction of Reality, homed in on this point by introducing the concept of social construction, which describes how shared concepts and expectations become institutionalized and thus implied within the social world. UTOK’s Justification Systems Theory (JUST; Henriques, 2011) helps us see where this comes from in our evolved nature. JUST reveals that the social construction of knowledge arises from humanity’s unique response to the problem of justification.
The problem of justification is an evolutionary adaptive challenge that shaped human self-consciousness and the Culture-Person plane of existence. With the emergence of propositional language, humans entered a world of question-and-answer dynamics, where statements about reality could be questioned and required explicit justifications. This adaptive pressure forced humans to justify their thoughts, feelings, and actions within social contexts.
According to JUST, navigating justification dynamics profoundly shapes how we think, act, and relate to one another. At the level of human groups, these dynamics give rise to large-scale justification systems: interlocking networks of language-based beliefs and values that legitimize specific versions of reality or worldviews. These systems of justification act as shared narratives, coordinating group actions, establishing collective roles and expectations, and shaping the realities we experience in our cultures.
As alluded to earlier, your mental image of your ideal garden, although only available through your subjective portal, is informed by implicit justificatory processes. The design and functional choices you envisioned for the place reflect cultural narratives about what you deem beautiful and meaningful within the cultural frameworks you are embedded in. These narratives are legitimized and coordinated by what is collectively justified as true, false, good, and bad, be it at the level of your nation’s culture, your family and friends, or your individually held beliefs. They stand apart from the objective observations of modern science or the experiential privacy of your imagination.
The core mantra of UTOK, Marry the Coin to the Tree in the Garden under God, points to the placement of these knowledge vectors in right relation to one another. UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge, introduces the mantra and illustrates it symbolically in its cover, created by Christian Gross and reproduced in the image below.
First, from the bottom-up, it juxtaposes the ToK System cones with the iQuad Coin, representing the human individual emerging out of the blue Culture-Person plane, binding its subjective uniqueness to the large-scale cultural context and the zoomed-out, cosmic evolutionary scale of existence. Both the ToK System’s cones and the Coin are homed in the Garden, composed by the Tree of Life at the center and its adjacent elements around the image. The Garden serves as a metaphorical womb that contextualizes the Tree-Coin relation, marrying the inside-out epistemology of the Coin and the outside-in epistemology of the ToK System in a relational, value-based context.
In this way, UTOK’s core mantra refers to the process of placing your subjective experience of being in the world alongside a coherent map of reality, clarifying what is the case in nature. The Garden represents our socially constructed value-orientations for living wisely, and it resides under the concept of God, which, in UTOK, represents the transcendent without committing to the idea of a concrete, personal deity.
