Dear Moira and all,

I can't avoid responding by re-presenting the opening of Chapter 9 of
'Natural Inclusion'. My 'loophole' was partly intended as an allusion to
'wormhole', though (though I say it myself) 'deeper', speaking of what lies
at the 'hollow core of all':


"The declaration of independence was the product of a partial and idealistic
vision, which led this one such form mentally to Box reality securely and
paradoxically in a finite, three-dimensional Euclidean frame stretched to
infinity, whilst vaunting its own free agency. By the end of the second
millennium CE, life in this frame was painfully overheating. Was there no
escape from the pressure cooker? What could this form do about it? Could
this form, for so long the World’s plunderer now save the World from
depredation? What kind of transformation would such a noble act of rescue
take? Would it be some wondrous new technology and/or legislation, of the
kind that this form was so good at inventing, again and again, in the nick
of time, as crisis loomed? Then there could be some great collective sigh of
relief, followed by a return to die-hard habits to await the next crisis of
exploitation. Or, perhaps, as one of Man’s star mathematical performers
suggested, it was already too late: it was now time, through the ultimate
technological fix of space travel, to move on like a virus to other host
planets, leaving the wasteland of His own vacant possession behind.

But there always was, is and evermore shall be a loophole: a window into and
out of the solid confinements of the ‘Adverse Square Law’, through which the
unbounded presence of space everywhere melts all into coherent, fluid
dynamic relationship. An eye of the needle through which to ask not how to
shift the world from a disastrous course, but how to help the world
transform our sense of individual, active-reactive self-identity into
receptive-responsive neighbourhood. A loophole at the intersection of
Vertical (‘I’) with Horizontal (‘-‘) outwardly recurving planes, to form an
electrogravitational centre of inference: a centre of dynamic balance in the
core and spread through the surfaces of all tangible, primarily non-linear
form, a zero-point source and receiver of all through all, distributed
everywhere. A core of pure spatial relationship, continually reconfiguring,
and hence utterly different from the fixed-point control centre of Euclidean
geometry upon whose illusory existence so many principles of human
governance have been founded. One place and many where apparently opposing
sides are conjoined and transformed into complementary dynamic partners via
the inclusion of light in darkness and darkness in light, in vastly unequal
proportion. One place and many corresponding with the notion of 'space' as
the '5th element' in Hindu philosophy, which both includes and is included
in the 'melted elemental forms' of 'Earth, Air, Fire and Water': a boundless
‘fifth’ dimension transcending the three-dimensional singularity of frozen
space and extraneous time.

Once ‘seen with gravitational feeling’, this boundless dimension utterly
transforms and revitalizes understanding of how we may manage our lives and
living space in a loving and sustainable way. Here boundaries are understood
as co-creative, co-created zones of differentiation, mutual respect and
complementarity, not severing divides between conflicting sides in
opposition. It is the implications of this transformational understanding of
our natural, dynamic human neighbourhood for the way we may live in
harmonious, respectful, co-creative evolutionary relationship that I wish
now to consider in this opening ending chapter."


There is also a link here with the 'Achilles Syndrome'.  I feel 'in a chord'
with Barry's reflections.This is a dimension of inclusionality that has been
clarifying for me only relatively recently, partly through writing chapters
8 and 9 of 'Natural Inclusion' and my Virato interview, and partly through
my encounter with Petruska Clarkson's book. Having described my personal
educational and academic experience of feeling (and being made to feel)
desperately unsure of myself down to a tee, Clarkson then goes on to
describe, in positivistic effect, how to 'overcome this weakness' rather
than show how it can transform into 'life, love and creativity'. Here there
is a close parallel also with the way 'my obsessive compulsive disorder
(OCD)' is conventionally regarded and treated as a 'problem to be controlled
or mastered'. I suspect there is a very close link between 'Achilles
Syndrome' and 'OCD', whereby both entail a profound recognition of human
fallibility, and commensurate ability to see through the 'positive' bullshit
that is widely used to cover it up. Similarly I perceive a link to Neufeld's
'hold on to your kids' (regain control/mastery?) approach, which recognises
the condition but may not comprehend the 'inclusional solution' (restore
receptivity) and so may tend to take 'the high road' to paternalism.
Inclusionality is not seen by those who may yet very accurately diagnose the
conditions that arise from a non-inclusional cultural concrete mindset.

 In these terms I see our educational re-evolution transforming 'Achilles
Heel' into 'Achilles Heal' - taking 'us' through the loophole from executive
center in a collapsed, Euclidean dimensionality to receptive inclusion in a
hugely expanded dimensionality..., enabling us to value and nurture our
frailties, not forever try vainly to eliminate them.

Here, I am trying to draw attention to what many would find the 'shocking'
idea that what our rationalistic culture views as the 'evolutionary strength
of perfectly adapted individuals' is actually 'inflexibility and
intolerance' and what this culture views as 'weakness' or 'frailty' is
actually a source of 'evolutionary resilience and creativity'. So I am
making an evolutionary virtue of 'frailty' as an implication of spatial
inclusion. There is an element of 'surprising people' into a deeper
awareness of evolutionary creativity by reinterpreting the meaning of
'frailty'. Pasted below is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of 'Inclusional
Nature', which also makes this point.



Warmest


Alan

-------------------------------------------------------

Compassionate Feeling: Loving Error


For myself, I can only report that when I am immersed in that dynamic
framing of mind where I am able to include space in my perceptions of the
boundaries of my Self and others, I feel an enormous sense of relief and joy
spreading through me. I can at last lay down that burdensome double standard
that I have felt obliged to carry through my life. I begin to see with a
compassionate feeling for dynamic context that finds a unique kind of beauty
both within and relating amongst every simultaneously living and dying,
inspiring and expiring natural form.

Gone, then, is the sense of analytical need to define, compare, measure and
judge every body against some objective reference scale marked out in
percentage point intervals from badness to goodness that take no account of
context. Gone too is the associated eugenic notion that the world can only
be made better through the elimination of badness until we are left with a
100 % monoculture of goodness that has only itself to relate to and so is
incapable of undergoing or responding to change. In its place comes the
realization that what we may so readily perceive from the viewpoint of the
excluded observer as badness - the source of all error, confusion and
uncertainty, is utterly vital to our dynamic, creative human experience.
Indeed it is vital to all life. It is included in, transfigured by and a
vital aspect of goodness in an ever-changing world. It is liable to be
harmful only when we seek to remove it from ourselves and so fail to include
and love it. Then it comes back to batter against the door we have closed
against it, demanding to be allowed access. When, and if, we finally relent
and give it its place, we may discover that far from being the source of
sin, weakness and vulnerability that we feared, it can actually be the
wellspring of loving and respectful compassion.

I have had many dreams about my own vain efforts to exclude from my personal
life this source of ‘badness’, which Carl Jung aptly described as the
‘Shadow’ Archetype. One such dream was set in the final of the Australian
Open Tennis tournament (as good a setting as any for an ‘inverted view’, I
suppose!). The Number One Seed, trying desperately to be perfect in the eyes
of the crowd, tightens up, over-extends himself and so loses touch with his
game - a condition often referred to in sport as ‘losing form’. He keeps
serving directly into the crowd and is comprehensively out-volleyed by his
mercurial, supple and subtle opponent, a rank outsider or wild card. The
Number One Seed has blond hair and finely chiselled features that Adolf
Hitler might have admired. Notwithstanding his classical ‘good looks’, he
has to sit silently in his chair at the Press Conference following the game
and endure the salacious profanities with which he is berated by the
victorious outsider, who has tousled hair and one black and one white
eyebrow. Oddly, though, the Number One Seed, representing Ego, is smiling,
as though knowing that he must accept the wayward intrusiveness of his
Shadow opponent, if he is ever to recover his touch and regain his form.

So I feel it is the self-defeating, unforgiving, crowd-pleasing,
perfectionist aspirations of goody-goody ness, not goodness, that makes a
Jungian Shadowy ‘sin’ of the presence of absence and tries to eliminate it
from human lives apart from one another and Nature. By contrast, it is the
honest, joyfully forgiving, fault-including creativity of holeyness, not
holier-than-thou ness, that holds this Shadowy presence tenderly in place,
opening our hearts compassionately in the common pool of uncertainty that
connects our human natures with one another and with all nature.
Uncertainty, as a purely relative condition, and with it the capacity for
error, adventure and discovery, is what we all really have in common.
Certainty, as an absolute imposition, and with it the false sense of
security and playing to the crowd pretence of ‘strength’ that comes from
denying or opposing the presence of absence, is what divides us, bringing us
into ideological conflict with one another and nature. We can be absolutely
certain only of our relative uncertainty, aware of the insufferable
absurdity of desiring absolute boundaries and fixed centres in a dynamic,
ever-evolving Nature.

Seen in this Shadowy light, our love for one another is sourced in the
inclusional humility of acknowledging and valuing the inevitable uncertain
aspects and associated frailties of our lives. This we share as we seek,
complementarily, to provide and relate to flexible, context-dependent ‘guide
linings’ for one another. My friend, Jack Whitehead, might describe these
dynamic guide linings as ‘living standards of judgement’, which account
continually for context, helping us to attune with rather than ignore our
ever-changing circumstances. By contrast, our hatred for one another is
sourced in the impositional denial that attempts to isolate bad from good
and claim sole possession of the latter, defined by absolute rules and
regulations.

Here we begin to see how what we regard as ‘weak’ or even ‘sinful’ from an
individual, objective viewpoint can, through its acceptance and
complementation, provide great resilience in the form of collective
coherence. In such ways may we love the enemy that we have made of
uncertainty - and the meek truly ‘inherit the Earth’.

By the same token, what is regarded as ‘strong’ and ‘good’ from an objective
viewpoint imposes a rigid strength that is extraordinarily brittle and prone
to shatter any form of collective organization. So, when we try,
imperiously, to impose this kind of strength on our human selves and
communities, we are building in the seeds of decline and fall in the very
process of asserting our might, at the same time as making life miserable
for those deprived of power. A wall of smooth, uniform bricks, without
cementing mortar, is intrinsically unstable. A dry stonewall comprising many
shapes and sizes, roughly interlocking through their common space can resist
all manner of disturbance. It takes all kinds to make a world, not a
monopoly of one. But our impositional Anti-culture continues to demand the
rigidity of uniformity where each is as good and strong in its independent
right as the other. I can only suggest that you stand well clear of its
constructs if you don’t want to be buried alive!

As I have indicated already, I personally have felt very keenly the demand
to appear outwardly ‘strong’, like the Number One Seed, another brick in the
wall of the academic culture in which I have been immersed. Indeed, whenever
I have admitted my profound inner insecurities and sense of frailty to the
‘crowd’ of my peers, I have found my career path blocked and even threatened
with termination. My peers have wanted another brick in their wall, not an
intrusive hole, and so any such admission has rapidly been followed up with
the question, ‘how can we have confidence in you if you lack confidence in
yourself?’ To which I have answered, under my breath, ‘What I lack is
confidence in your mutually supportive relationship with me - denied that,
my frailty becomes my individual weakness rather than my contribution to our
collective strength’.

In 1998, when I was feeling this sense of contradiction and imminent
collapse especially strongly, I found myself painting the picture shown in
Figure 8, based on some observations I had made of the distinctive patterns
of venation in a lobed ivy leaf and a heart-shaped leaf.



INSERT PICTURE HERE




Figure 8. ‘Loving Error’ (Oil painting on board by Alan Rayner, 1998). This
painting illustrates the dynamic interplay between differentiation and
integration, irregularity ("error") and regularity, and negative draining
and positive outpouring that is embedded in living system boundaries. The
erratic fire in the venation of a lobed ivy leaf is bathed in the
integrating embrace of a heart-shaped leaf which converts negative blue and
mauve into positive scarlet and crimson. The midrib of the heart-shaped leaf
emerges as a bindweed which communicates between extremes of coldness and
dryness.

As I look back on this painting now, I can see my attempt, in lieu of what I
felt I lacked then in my cultural surroundings, lovingly to embrace the
sense of uncertainty deep within myself. This deep uncertainty was the
source of my fiery enthusiasm and creativity as well as my susceptibility to
error, which I had come, like my peers, profoundly to disregard and
mistrust, as well as over-extend myself in trying to compensate for. Now, in
this painting, positive and negative were seen not as being in opposition,
but rather as complementary push and pull potentials drawn together by a
dynamically balancing, intermediary self-centre that included both.
Negativity, seen here as the inductive presence of spatial possibility and
consequent uncertainty, was no problem. Rather it was negation, the denial
of negativity - the ‘double negative’ of ‘false positivism’, whose
strictures and structures refuse to admit the possibility of error, that
could lead to catastrophic imbalance and the dislocation of content from
context, of self from other.















----- Original Message -----
From: Moira Laidlaw <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 23 December 2006 11:30
Subject: Re: Judging Educational Influences In Terms of World Leading
Standards of Judgement


Hello Jack. Hello All!

Here's some thoughts on your posting, Jack. They mostly allude to my own
clip. I wish I had more time to respond to all the video-clips you allude
to, but I don't, unfortunately. First, though, a general comment:
What comes through for me about the clips altogether is about the way in
which the juxtaposition changes the way you can view what you are doing,
and indeed, reality itself. Yes, I really think it does too, Barry. I hope
the following comments are in some way my own explication of what I
understand form my own lived experience.

You've said, in reference to my clip:

'I think Moira loves what she does in education and is expressing this
love in her recognition of the value of her students as they flow past
her.'

There’s a tremendous amount in that. Linking this point to the one you've
also made about how placing these clips together strips them of time and
linearity, is something I also relate to. In my sci-fi reading and Star
Trek enthusiasm, I liken this quality of multi-media, multiple-moment
representation as something like a wormhole in space. This clip helps me
to understand something I've intuited for a long time about my educative
relationships and influence and the development of standards of judgement,
which I first put forward in my thesis.

Although the distances between two locations (read also point-of-view,
character, psychology, religion, faith-system, experience, race,
ethnicity, gender, geography, background, history etc.)  may be physically
vast, in relativity theory a wormhole (curved space) reduces the distance
instantly to negligible proportions, so that one might travel from star-
system A to star-system B within moments instead of the years, millennia,
it might take in a three-dimensional universe. Wormholes in space to me
are like metaphors of human relationships. Fragile, yet strong, simple yet
overwhelmingly complex, a turn of phrase might create a rift that cannot
be traversed over any period of time, or instantly heal a rift that could
not have been reasoned out (and there is the vast, measureless, timeless
spectrum between them too, of course). Any representation and meaning-
making enterprise that captures this reality might indeed carry forward
our understanding onto a new level of awareness and reality. It might
render a three-dimensional reality into a multi-dimensional reality in the
blinking of an eye, so to speak! Such representations might genuinely
catapult human reasoning onto a new level of evolution for homo-sapiens.
Such is the potential of what you’re doing. It’s taken me a long time to
see it. It’s the juxtaposition, for me, wherein lies the potential of the
work you’re engaged in, we’re engaged in. Am I making sense? And in the
clip of me with my students in Guyuan in relation to those moments with
Tian Ping, I think we existed in this wormhole, which holds both time and
propulsion in an apparently time-bound and single-space as meeting place.
We both moved towards each other overcoming all sorts of physical-laws and
boundaries, to co-create a space of inclusion. We are both human. We are
both valuable. We hold each other in genuine esteem. I, as educator,
however, have an additional responsibility. It is ontological as well as
epistemological. I prevent this space between us from becoming wholly
exclusive, as this would be against my core-beliefs of the ontological
responsibility I exercise in those moments as authority-figure, as
educator, as named person in that relationship. In addition, this space
cannot exclude others because that’s like cutting off a body and only
talking to an ear – I still reach out to and hold moments with other
students as they file past: their presence must not be perceived as
intrusive in this space, but as a welcome part of the whole flux – but at
that space/time the core of it is myself and Tian Ping. That quality is,
yes, an important one to hone into a world standard, because it’s already
there! What do I mean? God, this is complex!

When Tian Ping (I have permission to use her real name) makes to move out
of the classroom – thus out of a space/time that may hold something
fruitful to our humanity – I seize that space/time (I don’t know what to
call it) and draw her in by expressing, non-verbally, my sense of our
shared humanity, of my care for her as a valuable human being. I mean she
already is that – she doesn’t need my endorsement for it to be so - but I
sense that she needs to be shown that I see it (it’s that Yamamoto (1991)
thing about the necessity of visibility, especially for women and
especially in a patriarchal country like China) – and I want the
expression of that sharing value as human beings together to characterize
something between us. I want to enable her recognition of that space –
expressly, not just implicitly. That’s why I reached out to her – with my
eyes, my smile, my hands. Any way I could ‘think/feel’ to get her to enter
that immanent space. Her slight smile, I take it of pleasure and slightly
shy self-awareness, and the fluidity of her movement with me aside to
symbolize our moving together into this space, seem very smooth. Once
there, all I have to do is emphasise what has already, essentially, been
done.  And I remember feeling that too at the time. I felt a surge of
humanity flowing through me at that moment: the wormhole opening up, if
you like. My educational life is characterized, as its best, by moments
such as this: instinctively, through a kind of perfect pitch, I perceive a
singularity, and know how to connect it to the whole. I think that
expresses well my specific educational talent. (I’m not boasting about
being a good educator writ large, I’m saying I recognize that particular
aspect as constituting the ‘successful’ ways I sometimes interact with
individuals, which supports the development of harmonious, productive
relationships in the service of humanity, that’s all.) So, in recognizing
that possibility (the wormhole) I dive into it, taking her with me, and
letting it blend harmoniously with those people around us so that we
weren’t a canker in the side of humanity, but a burgeoning part of it,
which has the potential to flow out and harmonise with others convivially,
so to speak. And then, knowing that the moment was, in one sense, time-
bound, I released her from it and gently, gently closed that space, but
not the time. The moment is in one sense time-bound, and in another
timeless. That's the art. It's, as Eliot said, capturing the timeless
moment with time.

I am using the wormhole as a metaphor (and a reality too), but what
enables movement into that space is love. The standard I'm deveoping in my
educational life is that of love, because, in my experience, it is only
love which can overcome our physical, and metaphysical boundaries. It is
both the impetus and the way.

I subsequently heard from her friend that this moment was one of the most
powerful for Tian Ping in her years of formal education. I received a note
from her peer, saying that this had truly given Tian Ping a sense of her
own capability. I wish I had the note still. I haven’t. Pity. But I did
have conversations with Tian Ping herself, which alluded to this lesson
and to this moment. And the words she spoke to me a month later: 'no one
has believed in me like this', I will never forget. They confirmed for me
something I already knew: this interaction was meaningful in a way that
education is meaningful for the development of humanity. It’s a spark from
a myriad of fireworks. or a snowflake in a snowfall - each one beautifully
and precisely unique, yet also a part of the whole. Two drops in the ocean
without any limiting sense. All is one.

I come back to the point: if the question is, how can we develop world-
leading standards of judgement in our work as educators, then, I believe,
the answer has something to do with developing love in our relationships.

Love from,