Tag Archives: LIFE

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Goethe and the Science of His Time.

Goethe searched for the insights that could reveal the world around him as the image of the universal idea. He sought them not through a speculative philosophy but through the phenomena of this world. “The idea is eternal and unitary … All of which we become aware and of which we can speak are only manifestations of the idea.”

 

This approach re-minds me of the Buddhist idea of the “universal mind” of which all things that can be perceived are permutations. It also re-minds me to take a direct approach to the observable aspects of the universe in order to truly apprehend their nature.

 

Understanding [Goethe] believed, is not so much a discursive, explanatory process as a moment of seeing – what he called “aperçu,” or “insight”.

 

I am realising this as I begin to pay deeper and more sustained attention to the nuances of sound which are apprehended in my experience. These are subtle and not so readily amenable to discursive exposition.

 

For Goethe, the world is no mere surface reality but a living cosmos that we can gradually learn to see if only we do not abandon a “gentle empiricism” [the effort to understand a thing's meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience] for the attractions of mechanical philosophy.

 

It is “life as the nature of things” to which I am turning my attention with the support of Goethe’s approach. The irrational and inexplicable nature of the “life in things” seems less amenable to rational analysis and cogitative manipulation than a mechanistic and quantitative approach, although I can see how the latter arises in response to the “mysterious” phenomena of the former.

 

 

 

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PAL. Chapter 25. Reflections on immortality. pp.663-689

 

If I remain ceaselessly active to the end of my days, Nature is under an obligation to allot me another form of existence, when the present one is no longer capable of containing my spirit. I do not doubt the continuance of our existence. May it then be that He who is eternally living will not refuse us new forms of activity analogous to those in which we have been tested. Goethe.

Immortality implies perpetual duration. This persistence of mind, and body in mind, is the sense of life everlasting. An everlasting consciousness is conceived as a consciousness that endures, i.e. it endlessly consumes new presents ion an enlarging past, while an eternal consciousness is one for which the present embraces all eternity.

The perishing of each conscious moment is unnoticed when it is replaced; the interval, being timeless and not incremented, is non-conscious. Thus, we feel a seamless and continuous self across perishings. In life, this “bridge across moments” is extracted from the present state. Since we live in the present state, the next state, the one that will replace the present state, does not exist until the replacement occurs.

If the real is the presumed oneness of the absolute that underlies a multiplicity of individualities, it can only be achieved when the appearances of perception and the illusion of personal consciousness are extinguished.

Heaven and the soul that seeks it should not be fashioned on earthly knowledge. They are, if they exist, unimaginable.

The duration of the present – the now – is not fixed and immutable but elastic; it can be contracted in pathological conditions, and expanded in meditation or hypnotic age regression. Yogic meditation expands the now in a “pure consciousness” detached from the flow of objects. Mystics have written of such experiences. They speak of an individual consciousness becoming one with the mind of god, embracing a world process of becoming of all past, present and future times in a single all encompassing now.

The posterior boundary of the now is extensible because its floor is essentially bottomless.

The notion of an individual consciousness after death is not a mystical insight. Keyserling (1927) wrote that mysticism ends in an impersonal immortality.

Emptiness is the insubstantiality of the relational, the negation even of relationality, for the relation is not a nothing, it is still a discrimination, an affirmation. Pure relationality or flux is a conceptual film that is finally unpeeled as consciousness attains absolute emptiness.

Ironically, what does not achieve nirvana is the very thing that must be elevated in karma and liberated from samsara, namely consciousness.

All objects, ourselves included, are recurrences. Change is cyclical. The appearance of progression arises as a vector toward novelty in a replacement of forms.

A universe that arises in god’s mind, and perishes in the mind of an individual at death, begins with the consciousness of god independent of nature, and survives as an individual in god’s mind. It is as if the history of the material world and the individuality of our conscious natures were but one idea articulated into world process and the manifold of conscious states. Arising and perishing are thematic in existence, from particle to brain, from the birth of the universe to its eventual implosion. They frame the blink of the Brahma, the cycle of life and thought, the unsettled boundaries of every transition in the actualisation of the mind/brain. A phenomenal present, an act of cognition, a state of consciousness, all arise in the decay of it antecedents and all perish in the next arising. Apart from the infinite nature of god, there is no abiding, no persistence, only perishing, replacement and an illusion of stability.

There is a painful asymmetry in the fact that life and death come only from life, but only life, not death, gives new life.

Existence is the elaboration of value.

Existence, temporality and value are preserved throughout all changes in form.

Individuation is a mirror of dependency as separation is of fusion, or entropy of order.

What is ambiguity but a perspicacity that sees too well form every side?

What is real, or what exists, depends not on the level but on the process that runs through all levels, and how this process deposits the categories that constitute the “furniture of the world”.

Every object is a set of contrasts. … The oppositions are created by individuation and autonomy. I would describe it as a common process, in which the members are co-arisings. … Every entity, every phase in cognition, every act and object, posits the world of which it is not, as well as the world in which it appears.

Life is a larval stage of existence.

Brains are “organs of concentration” for separating a world soul into distinct personalities … But the subjective pole is as contingent on brain process as the objective pole. Personality is a limitation inphysical existence of the subjective participation in god prior to birth and after death. Life concentrates god’s spirit, death liberates it to full participation. If before life or after death we are ideas in god’s mind, in life these ideas undergo restriction and limitation.

Each act of thought creates the present in loss and recurrence. The old present dies so the next can be born. The self is an island of fragility pounded on all sides by flux, veering this way and that in necessity and acceptance. Finally, we may understand that freedom is an assertion, not in power and confidence but in utter helplessness and despair, and in the willingness to receive grace in the pit of gloom.

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PAL. Chapter 23. Wholeness and the creative Life. pp.603-634.

 

Most of what passes as knowledge in people who are reasonable is provisional. Even the most indisputable facts can be disputed on some grounds.

The average person is inclined to accept as true that which is consistent with his beliefs rather than waiting to determine whether the matter is rue or not before ha commits to believe it.

To say a belief is objective is not to say it is true. Only that it is shared by others in a group or community. To say a belief is subjective is not to say it is false, only that it is idiosyncratic and not shared by others. The more idiosyncratic the belief, the more fantastical or incomprehensible the content, the more the belief approaches a delusion – or creative discovery. The more widespread the belief, the greater the consensus, the more belief approaches fact or dogma.

The pursuit of truth must proceed with a suspension of belief and a profession of lack of knowledge. Perhaps this is easier to do in science, which deals with relatively impersonal facts, but not of course when those facts (values) are bound up with the vanity and ambition of the scientist, or when they threaten to undermine another belief system, e.g. evolution and divine creation. A spirit of doubt, uncertainty, openness, even mystery, is essential for discovery.

… it is quite hopeless to change the moral character of someone – much less an army, country, mob – bent on a malevolent undertaking. The greater the disparity in beliefs or values, the less hope of moral conversion. The psychological transformation that is required for such a conversion is not unlike a realignment of faith or a shift in a scientific paradigm.

Perhaps reason does not always prevail in the decisions of a life because a life lived according to reason, or its correlate in strict moral rules, may not be a life worth living. The path laid out by logic, … , may not be the most scenic or interesting. The highway of truth may be a less exciting voyage than the byway of fortune.

Many of the most perceptive of moralists and the most poetical of the philosophers have asked whether the human spirit seeking self-realisation is not tethered to choking by layers of obligation, manners, responsibilities, the oughts of decency and consideration. The fear id that the social and self censure of moral acts will de-nature the spontaneity of non-moral action, e.g. that a habit of self-denial may smother the creative spirit. The artist is particularly sensitive to this concern, for his conduct embraces work and life in a way that is foreign to the average person. The artist more than most must steer a path between the imaginative and the real, self-expression and constraint, the wishful delights, the shackles of convention, and the more unusual and brazen the personality, the more difficult the adjustment.

The ancient idea of a man as an animal tamed by imperial reason is a false description of the human psyche. We have learned from behavioural anthropology and the bloody history of the past century that the most primitive of communities is no less moral than the most advanced culture. Reason can justify good or bad intentions, while magical or syncretic thinking can promote peace and co-operation as much as barbarism. There is no evidence that ancestral societies, given the harsh conditions, are less moral than contemporary ones.

A thoughtful assessment of the architecture of the mind leads to the conclusion that the qualitative shift from unconscious to conscious thought is not a relation of the animal to the rational, but a successive analysis of a non-temporal core into temporal objects. When we descend into the dark night of the soul, we do not find brutal, immoral and murderous impulses, rather a different mode of thinking: paralogic, animism, symbolism, metaphor.

The implementation of an action by character in relation to available choices, and the growth or decline of character in the options that are chosen, are the inheritance of each new instance of self in the recurrence of a living moment. The ancestry of every act is successively realised in each momentary existence. What counts is Now. Past acts do not exist except as a ground for the occurrent state. Yet we do think of a life as a collection of acts, responses, initiatives, that must be taken as a whole.

The microphysics of birth and death that frame a life, a day, a moment, a particle, have their analogy in the resignation and renewal that punctuates the reflective life. Self- realisation is not an accomplishment but a process that must be reasserted and renewed.

Life is the one great idea an individual has that pours itself out onto the pages of daily living, except that the jackets to the book are the fatal limits to its continuation, save for the debt to writers past or readers future – our personal or literary ancestors and descendants – who are illusory bridges to the bound and unbound volumes of innumerable other life stories.

Creativity is volition in service of novelty in which the agent is given over to the involuntary act.

(emphasis mine)

The agent accedes control to the volition that runs through him, not as a voluntary impulse where he is acting as a conscious doer, but as a felt creation of which he is a product.

The ability to assume an attitude of passivity or receptiveness is the essential character of the creative personality. The air of authority or assurance that one sees now and then in creative people is merely an attempt to achieve mastery of the conditions of life so the individual can surrender to the creative impulse. This, incidently, is an important piece of any theory of responsibility. The feeling that an action is one’s own, that it belongs to the self, or emanates from the self, is the basis for responsibility. However, this may occur in the absence of a feeling of agency.

The traction of the past weighs heavily on the freshness of the moment. One wants to shed the familiar garments for the naked sonorities of innocence and awe, feel the power sleeping in the subtle ferocity of words, listen to ancient wisdom, silent, at the throne of magic, possibility.

The conscious mind does not invoke, it edits what unconscious mind has written, which is I believe the direction of thought itself, from obscurity to light.

Authenticity is not found in the assessment of acts “from outside” as a judgement, or in a feeling that action is fluid or that conflict is absent, even if the goal of self-realisation is to be whole in every act. The transition to the concrete is not merely for comfort in acting. The unbroken is sensed by an intuition that is given whole as an immediacy that does not lead to something beyond itself.

Conscience refers to the effort at authenticity in a given act, but the feeling of having lived with authenticity is an intuition that pertains to a lifespan coherence of conduct with character. Self-realisation applies to personality in art, to character in ethics. Character is personality with ego- and exo-centric values at stake.

Knowledge partitions the self into beliefs, values and desires. Each is defined by the distribution of personal and impersonal conceptual feelings.

Experience is shaped in a way that is irreducibly subjective. Intuition is a way of knowing the rightness of action in relation to that experience. Ultimately, intuition and authenticity concern the view from inside, i.e. what a thing or person is.

The standard for intuitive truth is not the correspondence of scientific relations but the coherence or rightness of intrinsic relations.

The greater the depth of intuition, the closer to character or personality, the more resistant to verification. If adequately realised, the contextual relations recur and enclose a succession of nested particulars.

Coherence simply requires a correlation of self-nature with conduct,not good or bad acts. A malicious person may act in a malicious way or perform a good act, but he is no more or less authentic for the choice than a good person who acts well or badly.

Sel-realisation is the completion of existence of all entities, not the satisfaction of a momentary self.

Thus the stability of the self-concept does not owe to an unchanging core that is accessible to conscious thought. It is not a matter of a self that satisfies its desires, but realises the full actuality of the person.

Life is enacted in struggle. In the ordinary life, one adapts as best he can. The life of the genius is the fulfilment of the potential of self through works of art or science in spite of the claims of others. But for the great soul the other is “represented” in the self, and self-realisation is equally a realisation of the other’s needs.

The entity specifies a field in opposition. It defines by way of contrast what it is not by becoming what it is. … The concept of the self as having a subjective and an objective nature entails a contrast or opposition in every act of cognition or self-realisation. However, in the second sense of contrast, every particular that individuates is felt to be opposed not only to what it might have been or to a field of antecedent potential, but to another particular with which it is coordinate or coextensive. … In sum, every object in a perceptual field is a contrast with every other object, especially those adjacent objects (or colours) that form its demarcations. And, every object in the field is opposed to the antecedent ground out of which it individuates.

Though we find duality in every aspect of mind, the dual as an explanatory principle is not itself explained. The contrast of thought and language, or mind and world, is an artificial duality. They are interdependent phases in succession, not co-ordinate oppositions.

Even if truth and falsehood can be construed in a binary manner within a system or language of logic, most things in the world merge into other things, yet we still focus on the extremes, not the transitions. This is a result of the substantialist bias in thought. … The relative deafness or blindness to continua and the predilection for pairs in opposition occurs because the mind is more comfortable with polarities or contrasts than with transitions. The category stabilises the object over a range of transitions, while the transitions themselves are invisible to thought.

One can say, the whole gives way to the parts, which then serve as irreducible wholes for further analysis. No matter how deeply the spectrum is analysed, the termini are categories for analysis and instances in a (prior) category out of which they individuate.

In all forms of perception, we are aware of the objects (categories) the mind produces, not the temporal process (change) through which they arise, nor of the transition form one momentary object or state of the world to the next.

Unity is a dynamic harmony, not a spatial homogeneity. In oneness there is no division, no specification. Once a line is drawn, unity may persist but oneness is broken. A commitment is a loss of possibility. Every act embodies its negation. Something is emptied by the enactment, and defined by the non-act on the far side of its boundaries. … There is no oneness in consciousness, for its essence is the relation of self to image or object, but there is a unity that begins with the duality of parts and wholes, of relata and plenitudes. Oneness is the sought after, the profound but never uncovered primordium from which unity and diversity emerge. This primordial oneness is glimpsed in the recognition of multiplicity or many-in-oneness that leads to an inference of origins in the intuition of an unmarked whole. Self-realisation is the experience of becoming into being as every entity, to exist, strives to become what it is.

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PAL.Chapter 16. Morality and Suicide. pp431-455.

 

The progression in evolution and social development is from genus to species, whole to part, community to individual. Dependency is prior to separation. The individual becomes autonomous through a process of individuation. … Rationality may well be the enemy of sympathetic feeling even as it justifies compassion.

Since moral conduct reflects character independent of the virtues or vices of those to whom it is directed, and irrespective of the breadth of its objects, it is arguable what amount or quality of sacrifice should count as being altruistic or masochistic.

The being-conscious of the merit of the act, whether the merit is real or imagined, deprives it of some integrity. Is a selfish value hiding in the most unselfish motive? Should the saint or mystic not desire union with god, salvation, liberation? It is said that the bodhisattva must even surrender the desire for nirvana.

Altruism and suicide are anomalies that are fundamental to human nature. They are important because they reflect the extinction of self-interest in despair, or the sacrifice of one’s self for others or for futurity. Yet, inevitably, it is the mix of values in the self that guides the action.

There would seem to be few examples of ethical dilemmas posed by the happiness of a solitary person. Yet a hermit in his cave, however blissful, could justly be accused of indifference to others or lack of compassion as a negative moral defect.

… a life or death needs a justification, which is the meaning we give to what we have accomplished or become, or what we are prepared to relinquish. Most every life has a crisis at a certain point, but there is also a continuous need to justify, to renew and rededicate.

A justification – for living or dying – may be an excuse, but without reasons or justifications there are no considered acts.

Life’s gloomy companion, death, like an ever present spouse, often ignored, now and then insistent, a sullen background that weakens and enriches, darkens and vivifies, but always intensifies the drab palette of everyday life.

From the perspective of the present the past is a physiological limit on possibility, though layers of the past may anchor a justification for purpose in the future.

Since only the present exists, the duration of a life is not of great metaphysical import.

In fact, the length of a life is the feeling of its duration, not the chronology it consumes. The feeling is like a mood with indistinct limits and contents. A moos is punctuated by feelings. But a mood is not a collection of the feelings into which it disperses, as a duration is not a boxcar of moments in a process of summation.

The future in any event never did exist, it just became the past in the pressure of a becoming-to-actuality as an aim to self-realisation. To live in the past or present is to live at an early or final segment in the mind/brain state. Early segments elaborate memory and pastness, final ones perception and the present.

Moral actions are relational. We kill living things to survive or protect ourselves. To kill them without good reason is immoral or, depending on their degree of mentality – from prion to primate – ecologically unsound, which may also be immoral.

To grow older, nearer to death, is to cede one’s will to a greater power as if careening into the path of a powerful magnet.

The search for the sources of creative energy in layers beneath the conscious life, the recognition that meaning and purpose are not in the world waiting to be discovered but are generated in a process of self-creation, are the beginnings of true individuality.

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Chapter 12. The Ideal. pp.335-358

 

The notion of completion comes from the possibility of realising the ideal. If one could, in principle, see an artwork of perfect beauty or an act of perfect goodness, one could say, “There, that is a manifestation of the ideal.”

On possible source of the ideal is the evolutionary thrust of will. But positing the will as the engine of the world and the urge to actuality does not explain a striving to betterment that is linked to renewal and rebirth.

The ideal is not achievable because the final event that either shatters the perfection of the ideal, attempts to fulfill another ideal, or abandons the path of idealisation. Process does not end in ideal categories, it begins with them and ends with involution, the cessation of prior nature and the assumption of novel form.

With the ideal, it comes down to a desire for that which is the opposite of the most critical features of life, that is, for absolute spirituality or divinity and an unchanging, imperishable, timeless unity. These characteristics of the ideal are all linked to the idea of perfection, while the idea of perfection or the existence of perfection is linked to that of deity (Hartsthorne, 1962). If perfection goes out the window, as it should, the ideal, which is an aim without a paradigm, goes with it.

Life proliferates into every conceivable niche, until mind itself becomes the adaptive ground of change. There is evolutionary pressure towards increasing intelligence, and this may be a sufficient explanation for the evolution of more complex organisms, but random variation leaves out the lawfulness or regularity of the process through which advance occurs.

Metaphysical though attempts to resolve human conception with physical nature. Yet all categories, whether historical or spontaneous, by virtue of being categories, i.e. having generic properties without a specific content, are subjective, immutable and timeless. It is the nature of a category that it is described in such a way. So long as the category does not individuate it retains properties of the ideal.

This tendency to betterment is the natural bias of process. It could account for the evolution of forms that create environments for novel adaptations. But the tendency need not be reified to a goal.

The presence of the earlier in the later, even in the most basic entities, where what comes before is part of what comes after, can be construed as a kind of memory. Similarly, but more clearly the basis of memory, unconscious configurations in the mental state are conveyed into conscious conception.

The becoming of a thing, its life force, is a change over some duration. However, until a cycle of change terminates to reproduce a moment in the existence of the thing, the thing does not yet exist and is non-temporal. The completion of the becoming gives the thing its being.

As the font of the actual, the category is asked to do the impossible, namely, deliver a temporal existent out of a timeless non-existent, or shift from being to becoming, or create something out of nothing. But this is a transition from simultaneity to succession, the transition laying down the time series.

The many events in consciousness appear to change at different rates, and this is a problem for an association of time with change. However the change that matters is the laying down of the temporal order of mind/brain states, in which the multiplicity of events in consciousness are all partitions of the one event of the conscious state.

The ideal satisfies less an objective standard than an artistic potential.

A mark of genius is that even when the ideal is fully probed we feel the mystery of untapped possibility in wonder or profundity,

As the purely objective runs up against the totality of mind, the purely subjective in encumbered with facts in need of explanation. Yet a focus on objects is not the same as an objective focus. Subjectivity is ubiquitous. We live in mentality. Objects are the final reach of the subjective.

Categories can be interpreted in terms of prototypes, cores or ‘essences’ or, what might amount to the same thing, the average of the properties of related particulars. The prototype is a sample in the category that prioritises representative features.

… the core features of a category are what survive after the unique ones are canceled by overlapping perspectives. The core features that are common to all members constitute the essence of the category. The category expands ‘upwards’ or ‘downwards’, and can arise spontaneously.

The core self is also beneath introspective access. Once an ‘I’ individuates, the background is lost. The ‘I’ takes on direction, orientation, a disposition or bias to action, belief and value. The direction is the momentary person that issues from the core. The core is part of the archetypal world, the ‘I’, the world of prototypes.

(emphasis mine)

Only rarely in life or in art does one feel that an act, all at once or over time, satisfies its intuitive wholeness.

The essential character of the self is not immune to extreme circumstance, stress, hypnosis, brain damage, and so on. The self does not survive a loss of its objects. The self, merely to exist, must specify a world. The world collapses if the self fails to individuate. Conversely, for the world to exist requires a self at its foundation. Put simply, the world disappears if it is split off from the self, and the self dissolves if it is cut off from the world.

Mind is self-conscious nature, or nature in an act of self-perception.

From the standpoint of nature, the multiplicity of selves creates an infinitude of perspectives that can observe and contemplate the world-soul out of which they originate. Each perspective becomes an eternal past that leaves nature continuously enlarged. Objects perish, as we do, in nature’s drive to novelty, but they remain through us a part of natures mind.

In any event there is no concrete individual, no substance or intrinsic essence that persists in spite of change, there is only change and the stabilities that are its manifestations, for change itself, or transition, is imperceptible.

Unreality is not reality mistakenly characterised, for this would assume the possibility of a knowledge and correct characterisation of the real, when it is the categories that are real, whether they are mistakenly characterised or not. A reality correctly characterised is still a mode of categorisation, though one can quibble as to which mode is “more real” than others. Cognition does not merely impose its categories on nature, but expresses the pattern of a nature that is intrinsically categorical.

Basically the real is a feeling and a judgment… The former depends on coherence, the latter on correspondence, but the ultimately real is categorical irrespective of what it corresponds to.

Is a particular more or less real than its antecedents? An object does not exist without the concepts behind it and its supportive physiology. The concept is as real as the object, yet both are mental phenomena. An object is a collection of replications in duration. To which replication of the object do we assign reality? In a given replication, the object is delimited out of memory. Perception is the objectified tip of reminiscence.

(emphasis mine)

To put existence before reality is to avoid a definition of what it means to be real, other than the circularity of to exist is to be real, and to be real is to exist.

The real in feeling and judgment has a personal and impersonal interpretation, but existence cuts across the subject/object boundary.

We think of existence as a pattern of becoming that fills the temporal extent or duration of an entity.

Even if we could demonstrate the neural correlates of an act of cognition, all we would have is the correlates, not the cognition.

One can say, thinking is going on, feeling is going on, perceiving is going on, and then ask, how do ‘I’, how does the self, arise at the foundation of thinking, and how do concepts or objects arise at its terminus.

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Cristopher Alexander day 3 p80 – p120

So, as soon as I started looking at diagrams with dots in them and trying to see halos and lines that, as far as I could see, didn’t actually exist, I got a headache, and try as I did, couldn’t move past the dots – sigh

Three days of slumping, and something shifted, the metaphor of a sailing ship is really apt,

Going back to pick out quotes I see Christopher himself forwarns about this

P80 – ” These concepts – and therefore this chapter too – are rather abstract. However, I must ask the reader to try to grasp and use these concepts, because the wholeness, as I define it, and the centres I shall define as the building blocks of wholeness, are, in my view, the indispensible tools needed to understand life”

Having read through to around P180 now, i can use later ideas to make sense of what was sticking me  - one concept that is particularly jumping to me at the moment is the importance of boundaries

P83 “the entities are usually bounded: that is, at their edge, there is often a sharp change of structure”

I am with Heather in that Alexander does seem to be trying to make a subjective assessement objective reality, and he says just hold open to the possibility its true, and he will explain better later, thats OK with me

Alexander on different degrees of strength – again headache strikes – what?

Going back over these initial pages is again rousing a fury in me, it feels healthy, feminine and I don’t know what its about exactly. Writing it down brings me back to calm

And moving back to the text, I see clearly, Alexander is making very clear the distinction between the idea of  ’ a whole’  as a seperate entity, which in reality it cannot be, and a centre, as a focused entity and entirely defined by its relationships to other centres. This is shifting the paradigm of reality – and is far more accurate a guage for existence. At the same time it is opening and softening structures in the mind/brain, that have been there since a child. I love his use of the word ‘fuzzy’ here, that sums up the inner experience well.

P84 “When i call a pond  a centre, the situation changes. I can then recognise that the pond does have existence as a local centre of activity – a living system. It is a focused entity. But, the fuzziness of its edges becomes less problematic. The reason is that the pond, as an entity, is focused towards it centre. It creates a field of centredness. But, obviously, this effect falls off. The peripheral things play their role in the pond. But, I do not need to make a definite committment about the edge, and what is in and what is out, because that is not the point. What matters in the existence of the pond as a coherent identity is the caused by a field effect in which the various elements work together to produce this phenomenon of a centre.

This is true physically  in the actual physical system of the pond: water, edge, shallows, gradients, lilies – all help in the formation of the pond as a centre. And, it is also true mentally in my perception of the pond. That is why it is more useful, and more accurate, to call the pond a centre, rather than calling it a whole. The same is true for a window, door, wall or arch. None of them can be exactly bounded. They are all entities which have a fuzzy edge, and whose existence lies mainly in the fact that they exist as centres in the portion of the world which they inhabit.”

Which brings us to the contrast later in the next chapter, where Alexander, uses boundaryiness as one of the 15 characteristics of making  the quality of  ’more life’.

 

 

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CA – Sue – p 80 to 120ish

p 82

How a single dot on a page creates centres around it, which together represent the wholeness…

 

p 85

When I think of them as wholes, or entities, I focus on their boundedness, their separation. When I think of them as centres, I become more aware of their relatedness; I see them as focal points in a larger unbroken whole and I see the world as whole.

Experiment 1: Looking at my patio for the centres within it – the spaces, the shapes. Moving things around to see if there is a grrater wholeness, a greater feeling of life. I am no longer seeing an umbrella, rather an insert into the forest around which acts as the opposite of a window, bringing into greater life the trees above, below and on either side of it.

However, I read on….

p 95

Thus the centres we notice when we see the situation in its wholeness are not only the more dominant to the eye. They control the real behaviour of the thing, the life which develops there, the real human events which happen, and the feelings people have about living there.

So, I was again caught up in my eyes here.

Experiment 2: OK I need to put my hands in clay and just see what emerges from all this swirling thought. I have images in my head of ballooning out, perhaps that is what I want to express. (my past work has been about using the female figure to express ideas of transformation, energy, flow, contradiction etc.) I have big blocks of clay in the shed but I am too lazy to get them so I am using small lumps that have been offcut from larger sculptures. Normally I like to work from a BIG lump and create shape, but I don’t have enough, so I decide to build it hollow – just the skin. I take short cuts trying to create this balloon. It collapses under its own weight. Obviously. Clay has gravity. In disgust I lump it back to gether in some sort of skirt form to a lady.

Hmmm, interesting. I start digging into it creating rough hollows, emphasising flow. It begins to have a gargoyle look, I cleave the breast, put an Ahambra door on the back. Shake my head. YEWK…. this is going to be recycled.

p 116

The crux of the matter is this: a centre is a kind of entity which can only be defined in terms of other centres.

Experiment 3: Doodling geometric  recursive patterns late last night to see which might provide more wholeness.  I keep changing things  to see what happens. Don’t fill it too much! I begin to break out from the recursion and start a trail from one shape to another. I start another spot with bird tracks and just paying attention to shape and feel in a brain-dead state I create another doodle.

 Ok So not only my body wants to have a voice in this by giving me whirlybird migraines so the world looks refracted, now my mythic self wants to come to the party and paint a response in metaphors. Hahahaha. There are so many layers of interpretation I can put to this…. but I won’t spoil it for you…. what do you see in this? :)

Experiment 4: Applying the ideas to my need to report on my Singapore Action Research Project where I am almost paralysed with the complexities all the way up and all the way down….. trying to name and explain the whole and all the inter-relationships – I don’t want to be a system dynamic mapper. So…  Put CA into my head and ask what new ways of seeing this might give me?

What are the dots in my project? What are the centres that are created? What is the wholeness revealed from that or was underlying that? How can I be an artist drawing a picture with different centres working together in relationship… the reader constructs their own meaning in the space in between. That suits my more auto-ethnographic voice. Except I am not a voice, rather the curator. My participants are narrative centres – their life worlds, work worlds, mental worlds are centres, they are a centre for centres within them – many of the roles/selves they identified in the project. The dialogical relationships that were enacted between us revealed further system centres – at another holon level up.  Hmmmm. Possible.

Later I chat to my colleague in Singapore. Then I start writing up possible report headings. IN the process I realise why it has been so difficult. We are focussing on the WRONG thing and trying to answer for a percieved audience need the wrong thing. As a result of the participative project the emphasis has changed from our beginning injunctions…. the same centre is actually there, but more have appeared creating a new wholeness and a new focus. I am beginning to see what this new wholeness is. It is interesting, everything is still there, the relationships etc. Perhaps I am seeing the “character” in Matisse’s face at last.

p 97

What is this elusive character in a person’s face which Matisse can see so well, and which we fail to see as clearly? The answer is, this character is the wholeness. It is the overall vector, the overall qualitative structure, the overall field effect of the face.

Possible realisation about my art-making

Last March after an exhibition I really felt I was done sculpting stories of life in female form. For me my injunction 9 years ago was to explore vibrancy, flow, energy, life, change. I consumed books on art, and dived deep into manifestos of form and movement, knowing that sculpture with static dimensions is a challenge to give semblance of life.

I think for me I start with a whole – a feeling of life which expresses itself into movement and shape and attitude and personality. It is usually clearly held in my body, but also through my eyes. I doodle a lot to experiment with shape and sense of energy. It helps to have this before I put my hands on clay. It helps to use solid clay as the starting point, not to create hollowed work which requires fixed shapes mapped out apriori. Having this feeling in my body, heart, breath (helped by drawing/imagining with this feeling) I then put it in the clay. It becomes something different. but this whole is there. Sometimes at this stage of the making I have a title and a story. Sometimes not. The added layers of paint, pattern, images come later… the piece continues to live, grow and evolve as my consciousness comes into contact with something that resonates with the form to create a complete story.

Without this feeling the whole thing is technical. I like creating originals – not replications through moulding. There is something between my head, heart, breath and hands and the feeling of the whole that enters the work. Later there is sanding, which can become mechanical, or luscious caring.

Here is an example of a drawing capturing the feeling of the thing and the final piece “planetary healer” which came into something else…. a bridge for energy.

 

I am now in a lull point wanting to continue to express artistically but feeling I have done exploring with clay. Perhaps CA might give me insight into other ways to see, and create?

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Sue – CA – p 40 – 80

Pg 77

What we call life is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city.

pg 55

To produce this life, we must first see how life springs from wholeness, and indeed how life is wholeness.

I read this section a few days ago, became immersed in the comparison pictures and it evoked in me many memories about life and less life, particularly some recent time spent in Singapore co-facilitating action research for training leaders in a city of buildings that range from the modernist repetitive patterning of the housing estates which seem lifeless, to spaces where the diversity of buildings, their varying thrusting sharp yang and curved, receptive yin, the small eateries and curving roads in themselves seem like a rainforest. Perhaps the people are like the funghi in a rain forest providing connecting nodes to the buildings?

It also brought sharp memories of the people who journeyed with me on the project there .

One who looked up to the space between the buildings to find “clarity from joy from noticing”. His sofa was next to the window of his housing estate flat where he liked to lie and look up into the clouds, where his ideas came from. His project started with “How can I bring greater joy in learning?” and along the way he descovered his own joy was about being his authentic self…. and when he became his authentic self in the classroom that created conditions which enabled an enlivening of being and learning for his students. He described how he came down off the Confucian created “guru” pedastal of the teacher and could show his rough edges, his leaning towards his learning edge, and be transparent in that process. It awakened a response in others this authenticity/transparency.

One person took me to her special place – Changi Village  – a remnant of the old communities where shops are at the bottom of shorter appartment blocks – a thriving energy. We walked along the beach and I was distraught with the amount of rubbish. She said come into the water, and so much was floating there. I gingerly walked in. I asked her about the rubbish. She said to me that she doesn’t notice it, how special this place is to her – how she camped out here as a kid and the rubbish became material for buildings, for games, for costumes. She said to me – “what looks like rubbish to you, is OK for me. Trust us, we can live here with it. We dont need polished surfaces.” She took me to the top floor of her housing estate building where she lives with her parents, sister, brother-in-law and nephew. I was surprised at the life and welcoming of the space, not just the people, within one of these seemingly sterile buildings. I lay on her bed for a while, set up so she could stare out the window with brightly coloured rugs and felt at home, as I had not done in my hotel room – a swirling vortex of EM energy – by a famous Japanese architect (see below).

Yesterday, I had whirlybird migraine which shut down my brain and my ability to look (with normal eyes), only seeing life through a painful window of vibrating patterned energy. Hmmm, very funny body. You too want a voice in this journey. Perhaps truly somatic is taking the clues the body gives us in response.

I am wondering what is the whole story.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Witnessing process

I have gone in and read a number of posts and thoughtful, flowing, nuanced, profound comment streams on the JB thread, which draw on so many layers of being that have been presenced through the community and the readings. I am in awe, grateful, inspired, expanded.

I then reflected on why I am approaching my own journey in such a pragmatic way when I could bring similar intellectualisation and layering. But when I thought of engaging at that level of intellectual reflection to my own inquiry,  my first reaction was a bodily one. See below: my head going back and forwards going PPPPPPSHTHHHHH as if caught in a time warp. If I did engage this way, I knew I would float away into the stratosphere – a place I have recently been and taken much efforts to ground myself. I found myself hovering over a convection heater lifting my skirt so the air went up my backside. Metaphoric?

As I did so, I felt hugely stable and grounded, feet taking root and leaned back into the wall. I had this sense I needed to ground in the here and now, and let go of words and languaging. Needed to strip bare the conceptual thinking and enter this journey fully with my body, my nose, my bum. And, for my own work which is about writing narratives and research reports of my time in Singapore I realise I need to let go of my writing layered, layered, layered and write “straight” and simply in the same way as CA – carefully constucting a story and message for an audience around centres, rather than struggling to encompass the too complex “whole”. I need to let go of my own auto-ethnographic voice, very sadly.

So I can’t swallow everything up – else I will balloon. Perhaps I need to hold the balloons which are me, and you lightly, letting them go, while my feet bury themselves in the earth.

Is this what CA is doing to me? While CA and JB are inviting wonderful intellectual excurions in others, I want to re-arrange the pots on my verhander to see if their centring provides more wholeness and life. :) I want to watch the faces of my friends 2 year old triplets as they play a piano for the first time, while puppets lay strewn across the floor and really only an old favorite seems to gain continued attention. A mouse. Metaphoric? Aren’t we, according to Douglas Adams just an experiment by mice on “what is the meaning of life?”

I go and wash the dishes. There are always dishes to wash. The kitchen sink is the centre of the universe.

At least I have taught the kids to sqeek when the tail of the mouse is being pulled so they get the sense the mouse doesn’t like it. Purpose in life achieved, or not?

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LIFE – A Photo Essay

This is a photo essay I put together years ago from Alexander’s earlier work “The Timeless Way” which communicates his deep aesthetic for the human condition.

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