The Garden of UTOK Part II: The Elements of the UTOK Garden.
Part 2/3. Read part 1 here.
This blog was authored by Marcia Gralha, M.A.
The Garden is one of the core pillars of UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. Epistemologically, it represents intersubjective knowledge, the second person “we” perspective, and the intergenerational cultivation of wise knowing and wise living in the 21st century.
In Part I of this series, we explored how the Garden of UTOK functions as an artistic and symbolic representation of a scientific-humanistic worldview that seeks to integrate our subjective experiences, our cultural narratives, and scientific knowledge into a coherent whole. We also discussed how the Garden can be viewed as a response to the Enlightenment Gap (EG) — the historical fragmentation between our ontological understanding of mind in relationship to matter, and our failure to effectively align and interrelate the objective, subjective, and intersubjective vectors of knowing. The EG has led to persistent dichotomies in public discourse, such as nature vs. nurture and science vs. humanism. The Garden is UTOK’s ecology of knowledge where these dichotomies are framed as differences and dialectics that ultimately make a unified whole.
Here we turn to the architecture of the UTOK Garden. What exactly composes this space? How do its elements interrelate? And how do they serve as a map for orienting toward wisdom in the 21st century?
The UTOK Garden is an Ecosystem
The Garden is at the heart of UTOK’s core mantra: Marry the Coin to the Tree in the Garden under God — the phrase that serves as an organizing frame for UTOK’s latest book. Each part of the mantra maps onto the epistemological relations between: 1) the subjective knowledge of the particular psyche (the Coin); 2) the objective knowledge of the natural sciences (the Tree of Knowledge); and 3) the intersubjective meaning-making of cultural collectives (the Garden). All of these are situated within an overarching orientation toward the transcendent (under God).
The Garden is a symbolic, descriptive, explanatory, as well as practical structure that houses the right relation between these epistemologies. It is an ecosystem; a structured set of interacting elements, each playing a distinct role in fostering coherence and wise living. Taken together, these elements mirror the hoped-for relationship between knowledge, culture, and qualitative lived experience.
So, what are these elements, and how do they function together? Let’s step into the Garden and explore them.
The Foundational Structural Elements of the Garden
The Tree of Life
At the center of the Garden stands the UTOK Tree of Life (ToL). Across many cultures, the ToL serves as an archetype of a life source and a symbol of the connection between humanity and nature. UTOK’s Tree of Life has eight branches. The first four constitute the key ideas of the Unified Theory of Psychology (UT), and the second four constitute the Unified Approach to Psychotherapy (UA).
Thus, the ToL houses UTOK’s metapsychology, and the integration of the UT and UA serves as a map for bridging scientific and humanistic knowledge in psychology. Together, they cultivate adaptive living by linking scientific metatheoretical synthesis that stretches from the natural sciences through minded behavior into culture (via the UT) with psychological mindfulness and well-being (via the UA). While the UT provides a generalizable mapping of human psychology from a scientific vantage point, the UA is grounded in the professional application of principles of character adaptation and development, well-being, and psychological mindfulness to individuals and groups.
The MEme Flower: Bridging Individual and Collective Knowing
At the center of the ToL’s trunk lies the MEme Flower, a component of UTOK`s descriptive metaphysics. It represents the interrelation between individual and collective justification systems, reflecting UTOK’s mission to place metaphysical and empirical knowledge in right relation.
ME stands for Metaphysical Empirical, highlighting the dynamic relationship between metaphysical concepts and categories (the fundamental ways we structure reality) and the empirical data that shapes our worldviews. These relations are fleshed out in UTOK’s Metaphysical-Empirical Continuum, which spans from the broadest metaphysical concepts and categories for mapping reality to the most specific data gathered by research methods or direct experience.
Two meanings of empirical are considered here: the empirical data directly sensed through the first-person perspective of a subject, and the empirical data captured by a third-person measurement device, usually in a modern science context. While the “small me” represents the smaller-scale metaphysical empirical relations of individual experiences and the personal justification systems developed to understand them, the “big ME” represents large-scale cultural knowledge systems.
Because it is concerned with what we know and how we know what we know, the MEme Flower connects directly to the major branches of philosophy, as depicted below. Epistemology examines the methods and justification of knowledge (how we know); ontology explores our theories about reality (what we know); politics and ethics engage with what ought to be the case given our understanding of reality, and aesthetics explores how things like beauty, meaning, and experience relate to the human condition.
The Branches of the Tree of Life
The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) as the First Branch
The relationship between the Garden and the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System captures important points in UTOK’s vision. The ToK System is the first branch of the Tree of Life, marking the foundation of the Unified Theory. It provides an “endo-natural” Big History map of behavioral complexification from the Big Bang to the emergence of human culture. It maps the ontology of the natural world across four nested planes of existence: the Matter-Object plane, the physical world of physics and chemistry; the Life-Organism plane made up by the behavior of living organisms; the Mind-Animal plane composed of minded behavior of animals; and the Culture-Person plane, the world of symbolic justification and human persons.
The ToK System provides an objective scientific framework, meaning it seeks to map and organize the generalizable laws of behavior independent of subjective perspectives or intersubjective moral values. At the same time, in UTOK, modern empirical natural science (MENS) is framed as a system of justification — a knowledge practice that emerged within the Culture-Person plane during the Enlightenment to refine and formalize understanding of the natural world. Although it is born from human culture, MENS knowledge is designed to transcend subjective and social biases, building objective frameworks for describing nature. However, while it maps nature’s unfolding wave of complexification, it does not, by itself, tell us how to live. This is where the Garden comes in.
The Garden complements the ToK System by providing a value-oriented framework that integrates scientific knowledge with cultural, ethical, and aesthetic meaning-making, embedding scientific understanding in a broader context of shared humanity, value-orientation, and a broader pursuit of adaptive living. Taken together, the Garden and the Tree of Knowledge System embody UTOK’s vision of a dialectical relationship between science and humanism, bridging the “two-culture” divide and resolving the “science wars”.
Justification, Investment, and Influence: A Unified Vision of Human Psychology
Next to the Tree of Knowledge System in the Tree of Life, we find the three core processes that shape human psychology — what UTOK refers to as the JII Dynamics of human mental behavior. The acronym stands for Justification, Investment, and Influence, each corresponding to a metatheory in the Unified Theory of Psychology: Justification Systems Theory (JUST), Behavioral Investment Theory (BIT), and the Influence Matrix (IM). Together, they offer a coherent framework for understanding why humans think, feel, and act as they do. The gist is: as human persons, we invest our energy in different behaviors in the world in ways that enhance our social influence and relational value and are in accordance with our existing beliefs and values.
- Justification: Humans operate within networks of beliefs and values that structure our thoughts, feelings, and actions. These justification systems function as interpretive frameworks that guide our decisions and actions, both individually and collectively. Our moral principles, worldviews, and cultural myths all shape how we perceive reality and respond to events. For example, someone raised in a collectivist culture may justify their actions through a lens of duty to family and community, whereas someone from an individualist culture might prioritize autonomy and self-actualization.
- Investment: As minded animals, our actions are investments of energy that balance costs and benefits in pursuit of our valued goals. Behavioral Investment Theory (BIT) explains this process. That’s why, in UTOK, depression can be understood as a behavioral shutdown: a state in which actions feel burdensome because they are not expected to yield a sufficient return on investment. When perceived rewards diminish, withdrawal and passivity may become the more (perceived) adaptive default, reflecting the logic of energy conservation in the behavioral economy of Mind.
- Influence: Humans are profoundly social and much of our energy investment is shaped by the need to navigate our social world by increasing our influence and enhancing relational value. In the Influence Matrix framework, these are our core social motives that drive our actions.
The Common Core of Psychotherapy
As noted earlier, the right side of the Tree of Life represents the applied dimensions of UTOK, translating scientific insights into practical frameworks for human adaptation, development, and well-being. Given that UTOK was born in the clinic room, its framework naturally extends to understanding maladaptive cycles and how to help people break free from them.
The Common Core of Psychotherapy reflects this idea. It refers to key processes that drive healing in a sociocultural context: a quality therapeutic bond, a shared understanding of the person identity, struggles, and path to change, and a willingness to engage in activities that promote different ways of being and doing in the world. UTOK’s UT and UA ideas are the foundation of the Common Core, embodying both theory and practice into a unified framework for healing neurotic loops — self-reinforcing cycles of reactivity — where people get stuck in avoidance, blame, or misguided control as they struggle with negative emotions and situations.
The ideas on the right side of the Tree of Life help compose the Common Core. They are: a) Character Adaptation Systems Theory (CAST); which maps the human character profile in five systems of adaptation; b) Wheel of Development, which organizes the major domains of human development into identity, values and virtues, abilities, pathologies, and traits; c) Nested Model of Well-Being, which synthesizes well-being research into a unified framework of five nested layers of well-being: subjective well-being, health and functioning, environmental factors, and ideology and values; and finally, d) CALM-MO, UTOK’s applied psychological mindfulness tool that guides people to respond to life’s challenges with Curiosity, Acceptance, Loving compassion, and Motivation toward their valued states of being.
The UTOK Wisdom Bees: A Dialectical Dance
On either side of the Tree of Life, you can find the UTOK Wisdom Bees. They symbolize two aspects of wisdom as proposed by Aristotle: Sophia refers to the pursuit of deep theoretical wisdom, while Phronesis refers to the pursuit of practical wisdom applied in the real world.
The Bee of Sophia, also known as the WKID WISM Bee, represents intellectual depth that leads to adaptive understanding of the world. Its name is an acronym: WKID stands for Wisdom, Knowledge, Information, and Data, a reference to the knowledge pyramid, which reflects how raw data is transformed into information, which then builds into knowledge, and ultimately leads to wisdom. WISM stands for a Wholistic InterSubjective Mental Behavioral approach to knowledge, a frame that directly corresponds with Ken Wilber’s epistemological quadrants.
The bee of Phronesis is also called WIC-W Bee, referring to Wisdom, Interest, Character, and Well-Being, in direct reference to the key ideas in the Tree of Life. The main mission of the WIC-W Bee is to spread out “spores” of practical wisdom through the Garden. One simple way UTOK describes wisdom is as adaptive living, framed by what it calls the “adaptive living equation”.
A key aspect of the Wisdom Bees is that they also represent our “minded animal” existence, i.e., they symbolize “bee-ing” in the world as animals. This connects directly to the Mind-Animal dimension of existence in the ToK System, which we, as human persons, embody at a core primate experiential level.
As noted, the left and right sides of the ToL represent two core dimensions of UTOK: the left, UT side represents the metatheoretical scientific synthesis, whereas the right UA side represents practical, applied wisdom toward well-being. Consistent with this, the UTOK Wisdom Bees engage in a dialectical dance between these two sides, cross-pollinating knowledge between the poles of theory and practice, science and humanism, refined knowledge and lived wisdom. This is aimed at ensuring scientific wisdom informs human well-being, and applied wisdom remains grounded in deep coherent knowledge.
The Seed of Life
Beneath the Tree of Life lies the UTOK Seed of Life, a symbol of potential, intergenerational transmission of wisdom, and the Life-Organism plane of existence. It represents the origins and expansion of knowledge — both in an individual and collective sense — emphasizing growth, learning, and the extension of wisdom across time. The Seed holds three core elements: 1) the Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation (RMH); 2) the Educational Infinity Loop; and 3) the Wisdom Energy Icon.
The RMH is a “metaphysical gateway” that bridges mathematics, physics, philosophy, and subjective experience, providing a shared conceptual anchor that helps integrate different domains of human knowledge into a single framework. The Educational Infinity Loop is a dialectical framework for education, that integrates theoretical knowledge with practical wisdom, ensuring that scientific knowledge, ethical considerations, and applied skills are transmitted across generations in a coherent and well-being-oriented way. It also helps us clarify the various ways we can conceptualize “the truth”.
The Wisdom Energy Icon is a value-orientation structure that grounds human knowledge and action in the meta-values of dignity, well-being, and integrity, aligned with the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. The Seed of Life as a symbol draws from sacred geometry, reflecting an archetypal pattern that recurs across diverse cultures and wisdom traditions. It represents the natural progression of knowledge and development, mirroring the way seeds contain the full potential for life and growth.
UTOK asserts that a healthy society must be anchored in a consilient knowledge system, one that: a) is metaphysically grounded, providing a clear foundation for making sense of reality (RMH); b) is coherently structured within education, ensuring the integration of theory and practice in human learning (Educational Infinity Loop); c) cultivates both individual psyche wisdom and ethical value considerations in the collective, allowing for developmental progression across generations (Wisdom Energy Icon). In sum, an intergenerational, developmental societal progression such that our meta-values and transcendentals are perpetuated and built upon under an orientation toward the transcendent.
The STEPPing Stone
UTOK is a scientifically conservative knowledge system, meaning that all its claims are grounded in modern science and aligned with its empirical mapping of reality. The STEPPing Stone is a symbol of UTOK’s commitment to correspondence with nature, the material dimension of existence, and natural science. It grounds the system in modern physics in direct reference to the Standard Theory of Elementary Particle Physics (STEPP), i.e., Standard Model, which is inscribed in the Stone. It describes the fundamental forces and elementary particles that compose the physical universe and is widely regarded as our best current understanding of the structure of reality.
The Stone represents the fact that UTOK remains firmly anchored in empirical knowledge of the natural world. As a material object, the Stone connects us directly to the earth element, the base of all cosmic complexification, from fundamental forces to subatomic particles, to atoms, to molecules. It reminds us that our existence is ultimately grounded in the Matter-Object dimension, which emerged from the Energy-Information Implicate Order following the Big Bang.
The Stone also serves as a symbol of humanity’s scientific journey thus far, pointing to how quantum field theory, despite its complexity and counterintuitive flavor, holds a central place in our understanding of reality. It stands as a foundation upon which UTOK builds its integrative scientific-humanistic framework, ensuring that the Tree of Life grows from a solid empirical ground rather than roaming in abstract speculation.
Three Key Extensions
The Tree of Life, the Wisdom Bees, the Seed and the Stone make up the core structure of the Garden and each are included on the original Garden poster developed in 2016.
Since that time, the Garden has expanded and connected with related domains that enable the structure to serve as the holistic, integrating MEmeplex for UTOK.
The iQuad Coin
The iQuad Coin is its own philosophical pillar. However, the Coin emerges directly from the logic of the Garden. Although the details are beyond the scope of this essay (see more in the iQuad blog series part I, II, III, and IV), the Coin directly plugs into the Garden via both the MEme Flower and the iQuad Path, which links it to the Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation. The iQuad Coin represents the human identity, which means that it is equivalent to the small m.e. on the MEme flower.
The iQuad Path is a 4-step set of logical deductive relations that lead one to the UTOK Garden through the Radical Mathematical Humanistic equation. It starts at the iQuad symbol, relates it to the Euler Identity, then to objective beauty, and finally to subjective beauty in the form of the Equivalency. Clearly those relations are beyond the scope of this blog, and more can be found here and here.
The Elephant Sun God
The Elephant Sun God (ESG), UTOK’s representation of the concept of God, resides above the Garden as a guiding beacon for wise living. It embodies the synthesis of the sacred and the natural, integrating ancient religious imagery with a scientifically grounded worldview.
The ESG symbolizes transcendence, sacredness, and the ultimate concern, and it is not a concrete personal God. Rather, it is aligned with an agnostic, atheist, and syntheist view of the concept of God. This means that UTOK is a) agnostic about the fundamental nature of the universe, b) atheist in relation to a concrete, personal deity, and c) syntheist in that it believes there is such thing as the concept of God, believes it has been significant in human history, and thinks it can be a helpful concept to compose a worldview.
In its integration of the concept of God to the UTOK cosmovision, a connection is made between God as an orienting symbol and the negentropic transcendental values of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. The term negentropic here refers to the development of coherence, complexity, and flourishing as opposed to chaos or disorder.
The ESG is a combination of three powerful cultural symbols. First and foremost, an elephant in reference to the poem of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Sax. For UTOK, an analogy is made between the fragmented perception of the elephant by the blind men and the knowledge fragmentation that UTOK diagnoses as the Enlightenment Gap and the Problem of Psychology. The ESG stands in opposition to fragmentation: it is coherence in the form of the whole elephant, the whole consilient knowledge system.
The ESG also connects to the Egyptian Sun God Ra, who represents light, power, and the origin of all things. It also connects to the Hindu god of wisdom, Ganesha, depicted with an elephant head and known as the remover of obstacles, the god of intellect, and the bringer of good fortune.
The Dragon’s Lair
Lurking behind the Garden is the Dragon’s Lair, which, in many ways, can be considered to be the polar opposite of the Elephant Sun God. The Lair represents darkness, sin, foolishness, fear, and suffering. At the heart of the Lair is the Shadow Dragon, so named to capture the psychodynamic “Shadow” — the dark, ominous, dangerous aspects of the psyche that we tend to want to hide or try to escape from. Unlike the other elements of the Garden, which orient toward coherence and wisdom, the Dragon’s Lair embodies fragmentation, defensiveness, neurotic suffering, and self-deception. Nevertheless, UTOK shines the light on the shadow of the Dragon’s Lair as something to be understood, accepted, and integrated, rather than shunned (and, as such, inadvertently empowered). After all, in accordance with several wisdom traditions, suffering is a meaningful part of the human condition.
Many lines of thinking in psychology and psychotherapy (e.g., psychodynamic theory, existential approaches, acceptance-based therapies) have agreed upon how transformation of unwanted aspects of one’s psyche is acquired through awareness and integration, rather than denial and resistance. UTOK’s approach to adaptive living, guided by ideas such as CALM MO, orients toward wise engagement with the Dragon’s Lair.
The Shadow Dragon is chained to the cave by triple negative neurotic loops — cycles of avoidance, blame, and control that trap people in patterns of suffering. These loops emerge when negative experiences elicit negative emotions, which in turn trigger secondary negative reactions that exacerbate the problem. This cycle, rather than resolving distress, worsens it, much like pouring water on a grease fire.
The Personality Disorder Star lies above the Dragon, representing rigid and maladaptive identity, affect, and relationship patterns that emerge when one becomes stuck in self-deception and defensiveness. Finally, the Cave of Behavioral Shutdown, wherein the Dragon is chained, is linked to UTOK’s Behavioral Shutdown Model of depression.
While the Lair stands as a representation of suffering and fragmentation, it is also an essential part of the Garden’s ecosystem — one that, when navigated wisely, can serve as a pathway to deeper knowledge about oneself, integration, and wisdom.
Conclusion
The UTOK Garden is much more than a metaphor. It is intended as a living ecosystem of complementary elements. Its components make up a structured representation of how wise knowing and wise living can interweave to orient toward a coherent understanding of who we are in the cosmos and how we ought to live in an adaptive collective.
As rich as the idea of the Garden is, it cannot be put into motion without a real-life context. It is meant to be tended to, cultivated, and lived in. How do we step into this process? How do we cultivate a lived relationship with the UTOK Garden?
In part III of this blog series, we will open up the doors to practical engagement with the UTOK Garden. We will place it within the real historical moment of the 5th Joint Point — the accelerating transformation of human culture merging with technology. We will also explore how the Garden embodies a metamodern sensibility, integrating scientific knowledge, humanistic meaning-making, and participatory enactment to offer a vision for wise living in the 21st century.