something for the sharper arbor!

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Oh and if ANYONE would like to be included into the Group email discussion thats ongoing from the nature scope co enquiry please PM your adress and I will have you "included"!

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

New Thinking

Inclusionality

 

A Distinctive, Sensitive and Sensible ‘New’ Way of Thinking and Feeling About ‘Self’ as Neighbourhood.

 

 

By Alan Rayner

 

 

 

For millennia, we human beings have been teaching ourselves to think in a way that is psychologically, socially and environmentally damaging. Now, all the signs are that this way of thinking has brought our relationship with one another and our natural planetary neighbourhood into deep crisis. We cannot solve this crisis with the same thinking that has brought us to it. Nor can we more than temporarily stave off its painful implications by inventing ever more technological and political remedies that skirt around instead of addressing the most fundamental issue, which is how we think about the nature of ‘self’ in relation to ‘other’.

 

 

 

Ultimately, our only recourse is to stop teaching ourselves – and even celebrating – the deeply fallacious idea that life is a competition, a Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ between opposites of darkness and light, evil and good, you and me, them and us, there and here, and start recognizing life as the co-creation of these seeming polarities. Only then will it be possible to release ourselves from the addiction to conflict that has been the tragic hallmark of recorded human history. Only then will it truly be possible to love and reach out to embrace our seeming ‘enemy’ as ‘self’ through recognizing and encouraging the vitality of ‘diversity in community’, instead of trying to homogenize ourselves into co-operative unity in spite of our differences and assumed natural ‘selfishness’.

 

 

 

The route march to conflict always begins with an abstract material definition. This is the definition that seeks to put an end to ‘one thing’ and begin ‘another’. It is enshrined within what has been called ‘the law of the excluded middle’, which holds that ‘one thing cannot be another thing’ and, most especially, ‘one self cannot be another self’. This law is deeply embedded in the rationalistic logic of discontinuity that lies at the foundations of classical and modern mathematics, literal language, objective science, authoritarian religion, undemocratic governance (whether by elite or majority), capitalism and communism. It is based neither upon evidence – indeed it conflicts with the evidence upon which modern scientific theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and non-linearity are implicitly based – nor upon what makes sound sense of our human experience, but on the paradoxical and unsustainable supposition that ‘matter’ can be isolated from ‘space’.

 

 

 

The meaning in life that gets lost in abstract material definition is, most fundamentally, the meaning of Love as the source of true continuity that permeates throughout the natural energy flow of the limitless cosmos that dynamically includes all through every one, as a place somewhere, and every one as somewhere in the all of everywhere. ‘Somewhere’, as the song goes, ‘there’s a place for us’, from where we can look out and appreciate that what we are observing includes and flows into us as our lives flow into it. Here, our bodily boundaries that rationalistic definition treats as objective discontinuities that set us apart, are understood instead as dynamic interfacings through which our inner and outer worlds correspond as distinct but not discrete (isolated) aspects of our ‘self as neighbourhood’. Each becomes understood as a dynamic inclusion of the other, and the ‘gap’ between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ that appears to exist in a ‘snapshot’ of space and time disappears in the continuous natural communion of the flow.

 

This is the meaning that emerges from the ‘transfigural’ way of thinking and feeling that has been called ‘inclusionality’. Here, the term ‘transfigural’ means ‘through the figure’ as the dynamic locality (the place somewhere) through which energy flows from and into everywhere, and ‘inclusionality’ alludes to the natural inclusion of this place in the cosmos. Correspondingly, 'living' means 'being a dynamic embodiment of natural energy flow'.

 

 

 

What this implies for us as human beings is that our lifelong learning experience is continually shaping and being shaped by our natural neighbourhood in an ongoing evolutionary process. To attempt to impose definition on this process, or upon ourselves as inclusions of it, by way of prescriptive rules, is to curtail our creative capacity to learn, communicate and benefit from our own and others' experience in an ongoing improvisational exploration of nature and human nature. On the other hand, improvisational guidelines that are malleable enough to sustain openness to evolving possibilities, whilst rigorous enough to be intellectually justifiable, maximize the potential for creative and far-reaching enquiry.

 

 

 

But here we might well ask 'what is natural energy flow?' To address this question at its simplest and deepest requires a very fundamental kind of enquiry into what kinds of presence are needed both to account for the distinctiveness of natural form and to provide the possibility for such form to come into being. In short, we need to understand the fundamental responsive nature of 'Light' as what might these days be called 'electromagnetic information' (only some of which is actually visible to the human eye) and receptive nature of 'Darkness' as 'thermal and gravitational space', and how these relate with and to one another dynamically. Clearly, 'light alone' could not amount to more than a dimensionless point without the inclusion of space, and so it is obvious that light and space naturally include one another as distinct, but not discrete, co-creative presences. Every naturally occurring body, including every human body, can hence be understood not as a completely definable singular entity, but instead as a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space. As William Wordsworth put it, ‘in Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent, singleness’.

 

 

 

This inclusional understanding of natural energy flow and its included flow-forms as a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space is not the product of fanciful conjecture, but arises from an interpretation of actual observations in a way that makes consistent sense of our human experience. In some way it may always have been with us or accessible to us, and incorporated to varying degrees into the lost wisdom of the ancients and the way many of us form natural and loving relationships with the world and one another ‘without thinking’ too hard about ‘what we are doing’. In that sense it cannot really be described as ‘new’. It does, however, come as a radical departure from the paradoxical definitive (rationalistic) systems of positivistic, dialectic and anti-materialistic thought that attempt to remove uncertainty by unilaterally or bilaterally excluding matter from space or vice versa, associated with fixed worldviews. Space is regarded as an infinite presence that can neither be cut nor contained and permeates everywhere (i.e. 'non-locally') as a receptive source of continuity that includes all, not a 'gap' or 'absence' that divides material subjects from material objects. We come to understand our individual bodily selves not as discrete local figures driven by Newtonian laws of active and reactive forces, but as distinctive receptive, reflective and responsive local inclusions of nonlocal influence - where all flows through one and one is in all. That is we understand our selves not as discrete objective or subjective entities, but as dynamic relational identities, local places somewhere as inclusions of everywhere. We come to love 'self as neighbourhood' and 'neighbourhood as self'.

 

 

 

When we bring this understanding into our lifelong learning experience and practice, we include the 'passion' of responsive 'living light' with the 'compassion' of receptive 'loving darkness'. We become Sherpa guides to the inspirational territory of Nature, Love and Life, not authoritative instructors in the abstractive 'to be and/or not to be' logic of opposition and conflict. We speak of the evolutionary 'sustainability of the fitting' and natural dynamic relational kinship of life in all its diversity, not of the competitive 'survival of the fittest' on the road to cancerous monoculture.

[Saw-sick Steve]

Does er, anyone fancy a pint?

[Amelanchier]

Does er, anyone fancy a pint?

 

I suspect a pint would make it worse!

[Amelanchier]

Hama, it has been said that any scientist who cannot sufficiently explain what he is doing to an eight year old is a charlatan. This is obviously a simplification but there is great merit in it.

 

The problem with postmodern language like this is that it appears to say a lot but doesn't actually say anything. Or when it does say something, the point is often obvious or banal. Take, for example, the famous Postmodern Generator:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

 

In fact, this old debate - between "Science" and "Postmodernism" was raging up to 2001 when all of a sudden it went quiet. Fashionable ideas die so quickly; even more so when openess, inclusivity and cultural relativism requires that you defend the world view of the bloke in the cockpit with the box opener.

 

Instead of making the discussion more complicated, make it simpler. If this Inclusional Theory still hangs together when the language is blunt then lets see it without the frills. Give us the ladybird book version!

 

I suspect there will be some problems in doing so .

[Albedo]

So Allan R. sums up in his own style (from your above tract H)

 

Every naturally occurring body, including every human body, can hence be understood not as a completely definable singular entity, but instead as a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space.

 

As he seems to be aware that he’s developed a version of the English language which no one else understands, he again translates himself by quoting Wordsworth:

 

‘In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent, singleness’.

 

AR’s theory from what I can make of it reminds me of the Carlos Castenada series of books. It also reminds me of some academics who can find no other way to make a name for themselves. Robert Chambers – a big cheese in the development world made his name with a couple of books on ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal’. When you remove all the academic speak, he’s just stating the obvious. If you want to help people in a village in India, then why not ask them what they need. Believe it or not this was new to the ‘development’ world at the time (and not that long ago). As Tony S. says; it boils down quite often to stating the obvious.

 

Taking A.R.s summary of where he’s going with all this:

 

‘When we bring this understanding into our lifelong learning experience and practice, we include the 'passion' of responsive 'living light' with the 'compassion' of receptive 'loving darkness'. We become Sherpa guides to the inspirational territory of Nature, Love and Life, not authoritative instructors in the abstractive 'to be and/or not to be' logic of opposition and conflict............ ’

 

 

I still don’t get it. How do we act on this? If I become one of his Sherpas what do I change, and then what do I do with it?

 

I have no idea how to become ‘ a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space’ or if I already am one, then whats to change?

__________________

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Hama, it has been said that any scientist who cannot sufficiently explain what he is doing to an eight year old is a charlatan. This is obviously a simplification but there is great merit in it.

 

The problem with postmodern language like this is that it appears to say a lot but doesn't actually say anything. Or when it does say something, the point is often obvious or banal. Take, for example, the famous Postmodern Generator:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

 

In fact, this old debate - between "Science" and "Postmodernism" was raging up to 2001 when all of a sudden it went quiet. Fashionable ideas die so quickly; even more so when openess, inclusivity and cultural relativism requires that you defend the world view of the bloke in the cockpit with the box opener.

 

Instead of making the discussion more complicated, make it simpler. If this Inclusional Theory still hangs together when the language is blunt then lets see it without the frills. Give us the ladybird book version!

 

I suspect there will be some problems in doing so .

 

o.k, i shall go away for a little while, finish my soils assignment () and then I shall go over and over it for myself and try to come back with an ispiring ladybook version of the "inclusional" way of thinking.

 

Though certain Tony understands!

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

So Allan R. sums up in his own style (from your above tract H)

 

Every naturally occurring body, including every human body, can hence be understood not as a completely definable singular entity, but instead as a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space.

 

As he seems to be aware that he’s developed a version of the English language which no one else understands, he again translates himself by quoting Wordsworth:

 

‘In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent, singleness’.

 

AR’s theory from what I can make of it reminds me of the Carlos Castenada series of books. It also reminds me of some academics who can find no other way to make a name for themselves. Robert Chambers – a big cheese in the development world made his name with a couple of books on ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal’. When you remove all the academic speak, he’s just stating the obvious. If you want to help people in a village in India, then why not ask them what they need. Believe it or not this was new to the ‘development’ world at the time (and not that long ago). As Tony S. says; it boils down quite often to stating the obvious.

 

Taking A.R.s summary of where he’s going with all this:

 

‘When we bring this understanding into our lifelong learning experience and practice, we include the 'passion' of responsive 'living light' with the 'compassion' of receptive 'loving darkness'. We become Sherpa guides to the inspirational territory of Nature, Love and Life, not authoritative instructors in the abstractive 'to be and/or not to be' logic of opposition and conflict............ ’

 

 

I still don’t get it. How do we act on this? If I become one of his Sherpas what do I change, and then what do I do with it?

 

I have no idea how to become ‘ a dynamic electromagnetic configuration of space’ or if I already am one, then whats to change?

__________________

 

As I said to Alan sunday, he really has nothing to prove to anyone, as for the making a name for himself, behave you !

[Albedo]

As I said to Alan sunday, he really has nothing to prove to anyone, as for the making a name for himself, behave you !

 

Thats very restrained for you Hama, am I boring you:sneaky2:

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

[/b]

 

Thats very restrained for you Hama, am I boring you:sneaky2:

 

Not at all Paul, just that comment was a tad on the ridicul--arse!

 

To be honest i am trying to work out a way of giving you the essence without the transfigural math, or floral academic language that Alan is prone to use, because he is a high level academic and his work is read by high level academics, men and women of minds well beyond us simple woodsmen!

 

It is a shame because the nature scope co enqiury was so the opposite of this academic tongue, you would be more than welcome to join the next one?