2001-02-04
Richard Moore
Dear cj,
The Harmonization Movement seems to be getting underway...
but of course it's always been underway - that is after all
the way of nature. What's happening now is that some of the
tributaries of the flow are beginning to come together, with
the self-awareness of 'movement'.
One of the folks I've come in contact with is Ted Lumley,
who has put together an intriguing philosophy, expressable
perhaps as "transpersonal + quantum physics + biosystems".
The presentation, below, is not an easy read. It's a lot
like Bucky Fuller, with abundantly-occurring complex
run-together concept-defining phrases. Harmonization is at
the center of it, and the political vision 'coresonates'
with my own investigations...
"The ternary model suggested by relativity leads not to
linear hierarchy but instead to collaborative structures as
found in natural ecologies and in the traditions of the
indigenous peoples, where leadership does not equate to
'control' via 'power of position' but to 'wise counsel' of
people-appointed 'elders' on the basis, not of 'what they do
or can do', but on the basis of the coresonance they induce
in their enveloping community constituencies."
in harmony,
rkm
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source: http://www.goodshare.com/
Goodshare's pages are implicitly about social
transformation, community 'architecture' and 'designs for
evolution', ... implicitly but not explicitly. That is, what
is being shared on these pages are thoughts on an
alternative geometry for perceiving, inquiring, responding,
managing and generally navigating in the world, from which
greater harmonies may emerge, rather than explicit recipes
for 'what should be done'.
These ideas are not new; in fact they are very old, ... they
emanate from the basic geometry of nature, and they are very
simple. But simplicity can breed complexity very quickly,
the aesthetic complexity in nature is an example and it
builds complexity through a dialectical evolutionary spiral;
"symmetrical growth of constituent ==> antisymmetrical
container-limits to growth ==> container-constituent
metasymmetrical growth".
Simplicity which starts from the binary abstractions of
'one' and 'zero' can also 'build' complexity, an example of
which is the discrete and explicit complexity which
underpins all of the computer programs and engineered
machinery in the world. And the simplicity which starts from
the binary abstractions of 'good' and 'bad' can build, for
example, a theology, a religion and a church with priests
and doctrines.
The ancient, nature-geometry-sourced and
relativity-validated ideas which permeate the essays and
dialogues on these pages, do not seek to 'abolish' the
machinery of the western scientific modes of perception,
inquiry and response, they seek instead, to raise awareness
of the value of extending these modes in an 'inclusionary'
way, ... extending the 'one-or-zero' binary base which
produces mechanical designs explainable on a flat sheet of
paper (logical construction), back out to the 'ternary base'
manifest in nature which brings 'the shape of space' or
'geometry of space' back into the picture, the ternary base
of our immersed experience which emanates not from the
flatspace abstractions of 'one-or-zero' but from the
resonating volumetrics of 'outer', 'inner' and the
codynamical relationship between the two.
From the quark to the human being, we are all 'inhabitants'
of a 'habitat' and our relationship with our habitat seeks
to reconcile the inductive opportunity presented by the
containing volume in which we are immersed with our
assertive purpose as a constituent, an assertive purpose
which does not emerge 'out of the blue', but which takes its
contextual meaning from the opportunity presented to it.
'Opportunity' and 'purpose' are two facets of an 'essential
opposition' or 'dipolarity' in nature, the 'evolutionary
field' or the 'élan vitale', if you like, ... the innate
quality of dynamically transforming space-time volumes in
nature whose form emerges reciprocally with the codynamics
of constituent material forms and their assertive
trajectories. This ternary visualization of nature is the
visualization of relativity theory as well as that of
'indigenous wisdom' and it 'includes' the binary perspective
of the western scientific thought, ... a binary perspective
which sees the world solely in terms of 'assertive
behaviours of independent causal agents' out of the context
of the 'geometry of space'. While the ternary perspective
'includes' the binary perspective, it is excluded by the
binary perspective, ... and therein lies the 'rub'.
The things of nature 'recognize' that space is an enabling
commons, the shape of which is transformed by the codynamics
of its constituents. When we are induced by the
opportunities which our containing space presents to us, to
assert ourselves by moving into and filling a region of
space, whether on the scale of establishing a community in
an arable valley, or on the scale of physical love where we
seek a reciprocating, inductive-assertive 'full-fill-ment',
we know that the patterns of assertive purpose and inductive
opportunity in the enveloping, unbounded space within which
we are immersed players, are simultaneously, reciprocally
impacted. No region of space can be occupied more than once
at the same time, but access to the same space can be
essential to a multiplicity of systems, thus the dynamical
processes of space-and-time are interwoven with the
constituencies of nature which, therefore, cannot be
adequately defined 'in their own right', on the basis of
'their' properties and assertive behaviours, out of the
context of space and time.
Because space does not allow more than one thing to occupy
the same location, ... the 'shape of space' and the timing
of its use, or better, the shape of space-time, plays an
overriding role in determining 'assertive behaviours' and
that is the ancient idea that our western scientific
culture, with its 'binary base' seems to be overlooking, ...
at least in its formal architectures of personal and
community management. To 'forget about' the shape of
space-time and the fact that space is a commons is
'unnatural'; i.e. is a tree still a tree when we bring it
into a building where it can no longer 'share' with the
atmosphere which gives it oxygen and moisture in timely
cycles and the sun which gives it warmth and light in timely
cycles , and the soil which gives it nutrients in timely
cycles? Is 'knowing what a tree 'is and does'' out of the
context of its time-sharing relationships with its
enveloping space a sufficient knowledge of a tree? Does a
tree exist 'in its own right' in 'Euclidian space' out of
the context of time?, ... so that by starting from this
purely material-kinetic definition, we can then go on to
describe what the tree will do as clock-time clicks on? Does
such a definition carry within it the seeds of understanding
of how the tree came to be in the first place?
Rational knowledge, the knowledge of our western scientific
tradition, as useful as it is, is solely concerned with 'how
things assert' and does not 'take care of' the ever-present
inductive role of the 'shape of space', the reciprocal to
the assertive purpose of the constituencies of space. We
need 'imagination' to take care of that, ... and thus
'imagination is more important [powerful] than knowledge',
as Einstein observed.
Thus, simplicity can breed complexity and systems of
perception, inquiry and management based on binary
simplicity which ignore the 'geometry of space-time', can
build a different type of complexity than systems of
perception, inquiry and management based on ternary
simplicity which includes the 'geometry of space-time'. This
is what our society is discovering 'bigtime' and this is
what underlies the discussions on these web-pages, whether
they speak nominally to issues in management and governance,
or to issues in medicine and psychology.
We have a manifest, natural need to exercise our ability to
think 'inclusionally', to remember that all things are
'inclusions' which both 'include' and 'are included' in
space-time codynamics, and to remember that all things are
'forms' immersed within a common containing space whose
dynamically transforming interstices are the inclusory
'mother form', ... and where the codynamical outer-inner
engagement of these containing-and-constituent forms
engenders 'coresonance' by whose measure we speak of social
and environmental 'harmony' and 'dissonance'.
Rationality can take us away from the conscious awareness of
the 'coresonance' aspects of the space-time geometry in
which we are immersed; i.e. it can have us focus so strongly
on the 'assertive aspects of ourselves and our systems' that
we forget that space is a shared commons. More than this,
rational knowledge based architectures, which deal only in
the assertive actions of assumed 'independent causal agents'
out of the context of the space-time commons, are being
'technology-amplified' up to global proportions. The
rational perspective, which views 'things' as being 'in
their own right' in split-apart Euclidian space and absolute
time, a reference framing incapable of space-matter
coresonance, is giving us a major exposure to 'dissonance',
as is well captured in the words of the German poet and
playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805);
"The world is narrow and the mind is wide.
Thoughts live easily together,
But in space, hard things collide."
- Schiller, Wallenstein, cited by Erich Jantsch in 'Design
for Evolution'.
Physics, the 'queen of the sciences' and the authoritative
underpinning for the logical space and time structures of
management in our society, while having re-discovered the
need to account for the 'shape of space' through relativity
and (some aspects of) quantum theory, has been mesmerized by
its own inventions, shifting its quest of 'understanding
nature' to the quest of 'understanding its theoretical
discoveries'. 'The tools have run away with the workman' as
Emerson says, and so we persist in managing only the
'assertive behaviours' of things, as if space was 'infinite'
(as the mathematical concept of Euclidian space which
underpins our 'binary' architectures decrees). But our
biosphere is in no way 'infinite' and our rational
architectures, which live easily in our minds, ... are
increasingly in collision in the commons of our biosphere.
Evolutionary biology (as visualized by Caldwell, Rayner,
Maturana, Kirchner and Weil etc), which is now transcending
the rational-mechanical principle of 'Darwinian natural
selection', receives special attention on these pages
because its reasoning and its experiments look beyond the
purely 'assertive behaviours of independent causal agents'
worldview, ... and account for the role of the 'shape of
space' with its inductive-assertive, opportunity-purpose
reciprocity. For these biologists, 'the organism IS its
environment' since its assertive purpose does not develop
and evolve 'in a Euclidian void', but co-evolves with the
enveloping shape of dynamic opportunity space with which it
is presented, and which it, in conjuction with its fellows,
simultaneously, reciprocally transforms through its
assertive actions.
The world and its constituents, according to eastern
ancients and relativity, cannot be understood in the
simplistic binary terms of particles and assertive 'forces'
where we consider only 'what is done', but must be
understood in the ternary terms of 'a space-given
'opportunity to do' which is transformed in the 'doing'.
Nature, at its base, is an inductive-assertive essence,
where space and matter are not 'split apart' into
'something' and 'nothing' but have an essential quality of
space-matter 'complementary opposition' or 'dipolarity', ...
wherein all things manifest a tendency to 'full-fill-ment'
by means of 'assertive behaviour, ... combining the
purposive assertion of the individual constituent and the
opportunity configuring capacity of the collective container
within a coherent and unified, co-creative dipolar essence.
This ternary 'field' of container-constituent-coresonance
and coevolution invokes a natural, experience-validated
worldview which transcends yet includes the simplified
abstract 'rational' worldview based on the mechanical
combination of the monopolar 'one' of existential matter and
'null' of (Euclidian) space 'animated' in globally
synchronous time.
Tao gave birth to One,
One gave birth to Two,
Two gave birth to Three,
Three gave birth to all the myriad things.
- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (c. 500 B.C.)
The ternary view of the world, as embraced in the indigenous
peoples traditions, and as implicitly or explicitly
represented in the discussion within these Goodshare
webpages, does not imply the demolishing of the binary world
of matter-and-force, the material reality which we perceive,
... it simply opens up and extends the view of the
'architecture' of nature in the manner implied by
relativity, replacing 'matter and force' as the elementary
architectural units with 'field'. Shifting our visualization
to the notion of 'field', the inductive-assertive tendency
for container-constituent-coresonance, brings back into our
awareness, the manifest need to account for the 'shape of
space' and for the fact that all things are inclusions in
the 'commons of space-time' whose opportunity-giving 'shape'
is co-created by the codynamics of the constituents.
'Physics', i.e. the mainstream political aspect of the
discipline of physics, distracted by the quest of trying to
understand its own newly discovered tool, is loathe to
validate the need for this 'upgrade' from binary to ternary
in the foundational fabric of our social systems.
'Dissenting' physicists such as Erich Jantsch (Design for
Evolution, The Self-Organizing Universe), have argued for it
with deep conviction but have not been 'heard', as the
political hierarchy of the scientific discipline is itself
an artifact of the binary model and it controls 'access to
microphone' on issues of fundamental concept. The ternary
model suggested by relativity leads not to linear hierarchy
but instead to collaborative structures as found in natural
ecologies and in the traditions of the indigenous peoples,
where leadership does not equate to 'control' via 'power of
position' but to 'wise counsel' of people-appointed 'elders'
on the basis, not of 'what they do or can do', but on the
basis of the coresonance they induce in their enveloping
community constituencies.
In sum, the intended message in the discussions on these
webpages is not 'what's wrong' or 'what's right' or 'what we
must do' in the face of rising dysfunction in our society,
but is instead to catalyse an awareness that our simplified
binary models of nature and our corresponding rational
management architectures have been building a particular
type of complexity, through technology-amplified capacities
and growth in population, which ignores the innate form,
finiteness and space-time sharing quality of our 'biospheric
commons', ... an awareness that the simplified,
complexity-engendering rational models which live easily in
our minds are increasingly in collision in our containing
space, ... and that a re-vival of our natural faculty for
perceiving, inquiring and responding on the basis of the
transcendent ternary of 'container-constituent-coresonance',
can restore the natural harmonies which we are currently
dissipating.
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Richard K Moore
Wexford, Ireland
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
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http://cyberjournal.org/cj/guide/
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the people control their means of communication.
-- Frantz Fanon
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i.e., abolishing it.
- Warren Wagar, Professor of History, State University
of New York at Binghamton
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