Tag Archives: wholeness

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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GD. Goethean Experimental Observations for 12/06/2012

(noticing the phenomena of sounds arising from within);

Prelude: I have relocated to a big old house near the beach, with a forest across the road. To honour the occasion, we had a fire ceremony at the beach on the evening of the 12th June. After enjoying the beautiful starlit evening we returned to the house, after I have settled my son I settle into sitting meditation on the mat in front of the altar.

I sound the singing bowl, chant Aum and then sit with my double dorje in my hands, contemplating the energetic nexus that it represents, and creatively imagining the dynamic structure which it represents the underpinnings of.

 

I begin to feel the arising of kundalini shakti, gently undulating through my subtle energetic system and up my spine, out through the top of my head with a tingling sensation and into the familiar fountain-like pattern of return to the overflowing pool at the base chakra where the flow continues up the central channel and back out my head. After sitting like this for some time I feel the need to surrender into savasana (corpse pose) however I am also feeling chilled as it is mid winter so I take my body to bed and continue my meditation there.

At this point my body begins to tremble and shake, to vibrate from a deep-down-phenomenon of silent sound arising in the very core of every atom and cell. I note my heart rate increasing, and breathing deepening and lengthening. I am surrendered, all action taking place now is spontaneously arising of its own accord, I am remaining in lucid awareness and observing.

With the deepening of the breath I note an expansion of the abdomen, accompanied by deep creaking and groaning sounds, my chest and throat are also expanding to the sounds of cartilage creaking. My vertebrae are aligning and stretching apart. From a place deep within my skull a secretion of cool, sweet liquid begins to flow into my throat and upper nasal passages. This flow of (?) seems to precipitate an intensification of the phenomenon.

 

I begin to feel pressure stretching me from the inside like a balloon being filled, the air flowing into my lungs seems to penetrate every organ, membrane and cell of my physical body beyond their capacity to contain it in their present shape. I feel like I am being tickled from within, I am laughing intermittently and potent “chemical” tears are streaming from my eyes. My hands move to hover over my sacral and solar plexus chakras, the hands are moving in rapid circles counter rotational to each other, the chakras feel like ‘solid’ balls of whirling energy. The trembling in my body intensifies, my heart rate is still accelerating and my breathing seems to have stopped at a full in-breath. Part of my mind is cautioning me about the possibility of having a heart attack or brain anurism because of the unusual conditions. I consciously make the decision to surrender and trust the experience, even if it means I do in fact die as a result (!).

At this point an impossibly bright yet cool light erupts in both my heart and head (witnessed in the third eye) which expands out to include my whole body. Now all my physical bodily components seem to completely liquify, there is a sensation of dissolving and (hard to describe what) I imagine being like a chrysalis undergoing the metamorphic process. The level of inner sound which is accompanying this event is tremendous yet also very difficult to describe, something like a howling storm perhaps (I will try to find an approximation on mp3 somewhere). My inner eye is registering myriad complex fluidic geometric structures dynamically interacting and energised by seemingly liquid light throughout my field of awareness, all emanating from the core of my being. My physical body feels like it is a writhing mass of system interactions from the cellular level through to the level of organs, tissues and bones. This is a full spectrum immersive experience of something extraordinary!

The complex “body of light” which it appears to my inner eye that I have become is expanding to fill the room, expanding out across the forest, across the ocean and encompassing the whole planet, the expansion continues, waves of energetic intensification continue, I now contain the whole galaxy, and continue to expand and absorb greater and greater spheres of (?) perhaps awareness of consciousness – I am the universal essence in all its forms for a ‘moment’ – it is almost totally overwhelming. I am not breathing and my heart seems to be stuck on full throttle.

Sound begins to emit from my expansive throat, a deep moaning nameless sound. The observational part of my mind is still restless and registering cautions about the possibilities of damage to the physical vehicle. I decide that I need to ‘ground’ the experience and that I can Aum with it as a means of fully embodying that which is flowing through me (rather than becoming fully disembodied by its raw power). So I begin to Aum, low and deep into the lower chakra triad, and then a higher tone, into the heart, and higher again into the upper chakra triad. I slowly begin to reintegrate and re-inhabit my physical vehicle. The toning is re-establishing a breathing rhythm, my heart rate begins to decelerate somewhat.

I find myself glowing and buzzing, it is as if I have just been born, My body feels like a fresh new organism, weightless for a while, tingling and throbbing with light and sound – I seem to be in psychic contact with every mind I have ever contacted, all of you are right here with me, I hear your voices and feel you in me. We are all connected to this vast and fathomless energy source which is still flowing through me, as me (and everything and everyone). My subtle sensitivities appear to have been enhanced, yet so has my capacity to accept being in such a state.

At the time of writing, 5 days later, I am still in this ‘renewed’ state. Speaking with the Goethe track group (16/06/2012) helped me ground the experience a bit more, thank God for these eminently qualified comrades. Many of the images which have sprung unbidden to my mind over the last 20 years are now relating to each other in my mind in ways that they have not done before – so many symbols of a pre-cognised experience which only now is unfolding – the whole concept of time and space is so plastic. And underpinning the whole experiential context – the sound which arises from within – what a revelation.

Conclusion: No amount of theory can adequately describe a knowing which only direct experience can deliver.

The lucid contemplative reflections continue….

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Sound – water.

Sitting in the canyon just absorbing the sounds of the crystal clear water echoing off the rocks and trees, and reflecting upon the elements as they arise as “me”.

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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 11. What is a good act? pp.301-334

Morality lies in the capacity to choose and the responsibility that comes with decision, but choice depends on values embedded in character. Desire and conflict are manifestations of such valuations, while the final moral act is an adaptation of the psychic to a social world of duty and commitment.

… the tendency in moral philosophy has been to slice off psychology, eliminate the psychic precursors of action and focus on conduct, its context and justification. Psychology is individual covert, inferential, messy and complex, while action for the most part is clear and explicit.

Certainly, for a moral subjectivism, the antecedents of an action are fundamental.

The goal of a moral philosophy is a human psychology that incorporates a personal judgement of one’s acts and aspirations, ideally, a self-realisation of the better portion of one’s character.

Intentions are primary to resolve or disambiguate values and choices.

Choice is central to moral action, but there are desires without (explicit) choices, choices without acts, and acts without choice, though there is an implicit choice in every thought and act.

There is a qualitative difference in form between thinking a thing and saying or doing it.

Each moment, action resolves a mix of personal values, past experience, present conditions and future expectations, even if the person is revealed to be someone he himself does not admire.

It has to be conceded that “free will” comes at a price; once confronted with indecision, one is already in trouble, the more so if choices have equal weight. The greater the menu of options, the multitude of perspectives, the detachment, the less a person is likely to commit to a single path of action. The openness obligated by reason becomes a sanctuary for moral retreat. Reason confronts options exposed in the suspension of action and a withdrawal from objects.

We can begin by putting reason aside, for it does not help us to act. Knowledge is essential in providing conceptual alternatives, but it must be implanted in values for the right act to arise. … An emotional push is necessary for choice.

… the failure to search for error, a too hasty leap to the truth, or an easy acceptance of dogma – scientific, philosophical or religious – are marks of intellectual dishonesty and an attack on truth itself.

To act with an internalised social conscience is to be morally scrupulous. Darkness should remind us of light, the Buddhists say, and in the same sense the knowledge of life’s gifts ought to be tinged with a melancholy for their loss, for oneself and for others.

… detachment is less the assumption of another perspective than the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives, as in a dialectic, in which personal interest is neutralised by deference to alternative points of view. Ambiguity is the antidote to dogma and error. This entails a categorical perspective that does not capitulate to rival attitudes but surrounds them.

… conscious knowledge of right and wrong is not so much a prescription for action as a justification for actions motivated by the values through which knowledge was installed by the experience. … The idea that the knowledge of right and wrong can tell one what to do is sheer causistry.

Goodness may derive from a sense of duty or responsibility, but most people think it ought to flow naturally from character. … Goodness as obligation uncouples feeling from action when the impulse to self-interest is overcome.

Duty as motivation exacts a response by way of values; but duty as mere obligation is coercive and thus intrapsychically inert.

With the primacy of action, agency, thought and desire are subordinate to conduct. What them becomes of moral theory if the feeling of passivity to a thought, say in obsession, or that of agency in voluntary action, turn out to be phenomenal by-products of act- and object -realisation, not measures of actual control?

(good question!)

Even in the best of people, the examined life cannot fail to discover traces of moral corruption. We must account for our acts, and injuries to others, but it is the inner life that calls us to judgement.

The problem for subjectivism is to import greater significance to the psychic precursors of action, and to bring action back into the mind of the subject where it arises, rather than displace it into the world where it has its effects.

I think the ought of duty or obligation will continue to be a confound for a naturalist theory of value unless the necessity in virtue can be shown to be grounded in the is of natural process. Duties must be conceived as psychological constructs, values in ones character, not motives or brakes on conduct.

Goodness of character is to rightness of conduct as potential to actual, not universal to particular.

In mathematics, the numerical concept of ‘one’ has a formal identity across applications … This is not true for a real entity, which does not remain unaltered when it is separated from its context in order to compare it to similar entities in other minds or the same mind at different times. Every actuality actualises a unique qualitative ground.

The right becomes the good when conduct recedes from the objective surface of the mind to its sources in subjectivity.

Authenticity points to the unconscious moral tendencies of the individual that actualise valuations in the self-concept. Morality applies to the resolution of character and choice, the reconciliation of an authentic yet unconscious self with the decision and freedom to choose that are necessary to informed moral conduct.

What gives a person pleasure or makes one happy is not necessarily good in a moral or aesthetic sense. The dissociation of pleasure, desirability and the good is such as to vitiate theories of pleasure, happiness and desirability on the basis of goodness.

Desire is a conceptual feeling that arises in the “drive-representations” that lay down the self and its conceptual feelings or value categories. Desirability is desire that moves value outward from self to object. Desire specifies value in the desirability of the object. Desirability is the desire for an object of worth, since not all objects of worth are desired. Desirability straddles the subject/object transition. Because of its greater proximity to the object, desirability relates more to preference or taste that to desire, which is closer to drive-based affects.

The passage of what is desired, to what is desirable, to what ought to be desired corresponds to a shift from the subjectivity of desire to an intermediate phase of desirability, and then to an objective valuation of the act or object. The ought begins in the extraction of desire form drive, and continues in a progression toward the object, in desirability, which is “half way” from desire to worth, then concludes with its full objectification in the valuation of external objects.

The objectivity of object value, the feeling of obligation as (usually) external and the subjectivity of desire are interpreted as reversible and interactive, whereas subjectivity objectifies in a unidirectional becoming.

… the self is anything but rational, reason being an endpoint in the passage from meanings to words. For most people, rationality is a rare achievement. … The residual value in abstract and “affect-free” concepts must then be looked for in the value underlying the so-called pure reason.

Naturalism does not equate the good with hedonism, which is antithetical to morals, nor does it appeal to social ecology, or the behavior of sub-human primates, or the imperatives of “selfish genes”. Self-preservation does not translate to pleasure-seeking as the expense of others. The self goes out into the world and fills it with value; it does not accrue value for its own needs.

(emphasis mine)

Loyalty is an affective bias; goodness is impartial. A preference based on kinship, affection, tribe, ethnicity, is rational from the standpoint of self-interest but counter to moral logic.

Truth has empirical and logical grounds, these grounds are thought to be the basis of conviction, but the certainty of truth, i.e a belief that the truth is true, requires the subjectivity of belief to impact on the presumes objectivity of fact.

Beauty differs from truth and goodness in that it may arouse neural configurations that respond to balance, averaging or whole/part relations. This may explain the immediacy of the perception of the beautiful.

As to the association of the ideal good with reason, the good is reinforce by logic but not dependent on it. … In logic, thought retreats from the particular to the idea behind it, or the re4altions between ideas. Logic cannot instruct us how to act in a given circumstance. Logic does not usually tell us what we do not already know. … It is better at refutation than assertion.

The relation of the individual to society might correspond to the part/whole relation in beauty, but individual good is often achieved as the cost of much suffering, while the good of the many demands the sacrifice of the few. At least in this way, the part/whole relation of beauty differs from the one/many relation in society.

The universal is immanent in every particular.

(emphasis mine)

The aha experience, the sudden apprehension of a profound truth, the awareness of time and space in the perception of nature, the apprehension of deep order, symmetry and perfection that gives the experience of the sublime, for truth or for beauty, do not occur with the recognition of the good. Nor is there the same degree of cynicism. Because the good is a secondary construction, a good act raises questions of intent that do not occur for truth and beauty.

Goodness is conceived as the whole of its relations. If objects are relational there is no demarcation of object an property. The bundle of properties that constitutes an act of goodness is a complex of relations. The idea of the good as an object with properties rests on the distinction of substance and quality, or subject and predicate, for the property has to be a property of some object.

The good is not a natural, physiological (culture-independent) category like beauty or colour, or a consensual fact-based category like truth.

… the perception of colour, though subjective, is independent of personality, whereas goodness is directly related to character.

Any property is a category of sub-types, but this is especially so with goodness where the property has both a subjective and an objective aspect.

Even the most obvious property of goodness needs to be contextually decontaminated. An unselfish parent can ruin a child, generosity can degrade the feeling of self-worth, etc. As with truth or beauty, the good is illustrated and taught by examples, but the category of the good rests more precariously than truth and beauty on its concrete illustrations.

The presence of covert emotion in reason, or the ability to rationalise feeling, implies that reason itself has an affective tone. The ideal develops out of the conceptual feeling as an experience of the pre-object category. Put differently, ideals are created out of categories as rational aims that can supplant the affective aims of desire. When an ideal becomes the goal of a desire, the affective element dissolves in an object into which it can discharge, while the rational element reatins the meaning in a concept that is unspecified as to content and intention.

It is not a simple matter to desire a generality, a universality or an ideal that is not accented by some instance of possibility.

… the desire for the category is more like a yearning or a longing, which is a waiting for the object to clarify, while a desire directed to an object embodies the wish to have it: it excludes similar objects and suffers the fear of its loss. Just as we generalise an ideal from the particular in the good objects of desire, we seek an ideal love or in life the particular in the category.

The good is not a natural category, like beauty, nor a logical one like truth, which enfold instances of their expression, but an artifice derived from its examples. … Goodness is a conventional category abstracted from its examples not prior to them.

As an ideal self, the good is a subjective possibility that aims at self-realisation. That is, the categories that specify the particulars of conduct can themselves be idealised at subjective or objective polarity. … On this view, one’s moral duty is not to conform one’s conduct to the ideal good, but to realise in all acts the ideal self.

(emphasis mine)

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CA – 49 – Sue

p 4

The flower is the temporary product of the unfolding of the bud and seed pod under the driving influence of DNA

p 6

Thus we see that each given wholeness has a certain history; the wholeness becomes more valuable of the history allows this wholeness to unfold in a way that is considerate, respectful, of the existing structure.

p9

Real kindness is quite different, valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by a grasp for a goal, but by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another.

p 19

… the emergence of new structure in nature is brought about always by a sequence of transformation which act on the whole and in which each step emerges as a discernible and continious result from the immediately preceding whole.

p 45

the evolution of any natural system is governed by the transformations of the mathematical wholenss and by tendency inherent in these transformations for the whole to unfold in a particular fdirection.

Thus the principle of unfolding wholeness has great promise as  a way of explaining form creation. It introduces little that is new, is consistent with existing physical theory on almost all points, and yet creates an entirely fresh perspective which can explain the emergence of living structure, without us having to resort to a teleological urge to life.

In reading this whole section I remember (again)  my attraction to take up physics at uni was a geometrical one (inspired by the symmetry between qantum particles and eastern mandelas in a book entitled “the fabric of the universe”) and that the selection of my honours thesis was based”on” theories of fermi surfaces – the geometrical shapes of the properties of atoms that enable the bonding of atoms to create the macro-shape of solids that they do, as well as the really neat semi-conductor properties.

The actual doing of my honours thesis, unfortunately, had nothing to do with geometry…. just mind-numbing readings on a potentiometer getting electrical readings from a simple circuit of alloy metal in a a little cryogenic container I designed stuck down the neck of a big container of liquid Helium (4 degrees Kelvin). Reuctionistic techniques. Only later, participating in a workshop on sacred maths where we meditated/visualized the different developments of the cell, spiltting into successively more complex geometric shapes …. and sat in a duadecahedron for a while, feeling the resonance of these different shapes in our bodies …. did I get a big AHA moment.

But as things go with AHA moments, you remember you had them, that during them you perceived something deeply and profoundly…. but then that deep knowing seems to elude you when trying to recall it. It is deep inside me somewhere. It seems to be evoked now and then. But looking at tile patterns and turkish carpets doesn’t do it for me at the moment. Too static?

One thing I am noticing about myself is that my intellectualising and big picture thinking capacity seems very much reduced. I am having difficulty doing the work I am normally so good at and which I have deadlines to do at the moment (even though I am supposedly on holiday) . Bonnie, it is like all the development of those arrows on your map have now rescinded for me. I can barely do comparisons and hold two things in my head. I am turning into a lizard.

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CA – p 200 -240 – Sue

 p 200

Life cannot occur without differentiation. Unity can only be created from distinctions.

However, the most important contrasts do not merely show variety of form but represent true opposites, which eventually annhilate each other when they are superimposed.

p 203

In case after case evidence suggests that the sharp extended and visible differences between things which are different allows each centre to take it’s proper nature. It permits more intensive attention to individual functions. And it creates a feeling of distinction which relaxes people, because it acknowledges and permits different dimensions of expression.

It is the differentiation of the void which gives birth to matter. All differentiation requires that contrast is created in space to give birth to anything at all.

p 205

Qualities vary slowly, subtly, gradually across the extent of each thing.

p 212

To make a thing live its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will….. roughness is always the product of abandon – it is created whenever a person is truly free and doing only whatever is essential.

p 213

A person can only allow the regularity or order of a situation to be let loose, according to the wholeness that is required, when he or she gets in this special state of mind, this egolessness, which allows each part ot made exactly as it needs to be.

Roughness does not seek to superimpose an arbitrary order over a design, but instead lets the larger order be relaxed.

p 218

When echoes are present, the various smaller elements and centres, fronm the which the larger centres are made, are all member of the same family; they contain echoes of one another; there are deep internal similarities between them which ties them together to form a single entity.

p 222

In the most profound centres which have perfect wholeness, there is at the heart a void.

p 225

This emptiness is needed in some form by every centre, large or small. It is the quiet that draws the centres energy to itself, gives it the basis of its strength.

P226

Simplicity and calm…. comes about when everything unnecessary is removed. All centres that are not actively supporting others centres are slipped out, cut out, excised.

P236

What not-separateness mean, quite simply is that we experience a living whole as being at one with the world and not separate from it.

In a centre which is deeply coherent there is a lack of separation – instead a profound connection – between that centre and the other centres which surround it, so that the various centres melt into one another and become inseparable.

….with them usually you csnnot really tell where one thing breaks off and the next begins, because the thing is smokily drawn into the world around it, and softly draws the world into itself. It asserts the continuity of space, the continuity of us all.

In all things which have not-separateness there is often a fragmented boundary, an incomplete edge, which destroys the hard line…. the sense of self-containment…

p 228…

 these 15 properties appear naturally and inevitably from the nature of wholeness, and in which it becomes clear how and why life occurs in space, not as an attribute of living organisms, but as an attribute of spece itself.

p 241

In effect the 15 properties are the glue, through which space is able to be unified…. are the ways it comes to life.

by

CA, V1, 41 – 80, Phil

P.45

The quality I call life in these buildings exists as a quality.

P.49

In a few cases, life in a thing, or in a person, or in an action, or in a building, reaches a level of intensity which is truly remarkable.

P.55

To produce life, we must first see how life springs from wholeness, and indeed how life is wholeness. Wholeness exists all around us, and life springs from it.

P.59

Yes. The answer is yes.

P.61

Their easiness takes the breath away.

P.64

P.75

Is the foundation of modern architecture threatened by this innocent question?

P.76

…awareness that if it does exist, then everything in society, and in our view of the world, must change.

P.76

All of the defenses, which are created in our minds to protect the legitimacy of the mechanistic world-picture, start to argue against the question, do not like it being asked, want to characterize it as nonesense.

P.77

…the judgement about life appears to be a fundamental, primitive quality in things…

P.80

Allow these pages to prepare the groundwork for our ability to understand life as a structure.

by

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?