Dear Diana,

Many thanks.

Yes, Gregory Bateson is one of many authors whose work I have not read 
first-hand, but seems from what others tell me at least to have been 'on the 
track of inclusionality', if not quite having 'got the point' of the 
fundamental problem at the core of 'closed space geometries' and associated 
need for a shift to dynamic relational geometry.

I'm attaching a quite expansive paper by myself and Timo Jarvilehto, which 
elaborates on some of the psychological themes that might interest you. The 
paper is due out in this month's issue of 'Transfigural Mathematics', which 
will be available in due course on line at www.inclusional-research.org.

Warmest

Alan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dianne Allen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: AA Thread 2 07-08 How do i~we explain our educational 
influences in learning to improve our educational influences as 
practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations that 
dynamically include us?


Again, Alan, this helps me 'make connections', and this time with Gregory
Bateson's point:

that many of the words we use and definitions associated with those words
are, (as I understand Gregory Bateson, and perhaps misuse his terms)
tautologies (self-sealing logic - closure in another way) and faulty, and on
the assumption that the pattern seen so far is the pattern for ever, and
that the next instance is likely to disprove the lot! and that as we
'anatomise' as Moira helpful puts it, we raise a selection of sequence, both
the point of the beginning of the selection and the point of the end of the
selection, (Bateson's 'punctuation' p.298-301 of Steps to an ecology of
mind) and arbitrarily chosen, to some sort of reification.

Dianne Allen
Kiama


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alan Rayner (BU)" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 4:52 AM
Subject: Re: AA Thread 2 07-08 How do i~we explain our educational
influences in learning to improve our educational influences as
practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations that
dynamically include us?


Dear Moira,

Thanks, yes, I feel you are very close indeed to my meanings.

But just to show where there is a seemingly small, but very deep  issue, I
would say that 'the hole is in the art', not 'the whole in the part'. Talk
of wholes and parts is rationalistic, in my view, though the intention - and
I feel sure your intention - may be otherwise. Our human problem, at the
core of rationalism, as Robert Frost recognised in the quote below, is in
our continual effort to COMPLETE things:

“Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he
does so by making a garden and building a wall” - Robert Frost


This is where the turn around to 'variable openness' is so significant and
radical - that the very idea of absolute closure - and a whole variety of
associated definitive concepts - is recognised to be impossible in a fluid
dynamic Nature. So long as our thinking is predicated on closure - and it is
both in conventional relativity theory and quantum mechanics because of the
discontinuity embedded in the underlying mathematics - we will exclude the
openness that is natural and meaningful and believe in some unkind or other
of non-existent forceful agency.

I'm pasting below a further section from Lere and my present writing, which
may clarify also some of the issues of bidirectionality you raise with Jack.

Warmest

Alan
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

‘Where does power come from?’



Let’s personalize this question, as a way of recognizing how the
rationalistic splitting of subject from object, observer from observed,
produces paradox and an ultimate incompatibility between ‘point-forces’ and
‘point-entities’. Try asking:



‘Where does the power that moves us come from?’



A domineering mind will answer ‘within us’, so assigning sole responsibility
for ‘action’ to individual or group as an independent entity. A subservient
mind will answer ‘outside us’, so delegating responsibility for ‘reaction’
entirely to ‘action’ located elsewhere. Neither answer is realistic. Both
answers assume an absolute division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as
objectively definable localities, such that the source of all power can be
tracked down to a fixed point within or without, that is a ‘point-force’
that drives the ‘point-mass’ either from within itself or outside itself.
Hence there is ambiguity regarding which ‘point-force’ to believe in as
ultimate cause of the movement of the ‘point-mass’, with the two kinds of
point irreconcilably differentiated. A bridge connecting the two may be
sought so as to unify one with the other, as in supersymmetry, but so long
as space is excluded from each point and substituted with only another kind
of point, all possibility of flow within and between them is precluded.



No sooner, however, is space everywhere (‘omni’) recognised to span
continuously between (‘inter’), within (‘intra’) and throughout (‘trans’)
each point, than bidirectional flow from and into each other as simultaneous
local-non-local sources and sinks in natural, dynamically balancing
communion becomes not only possible, but inevitable – unless by some
infinitely remote likelihood everywhere equilibrates at once and the cosmos
gridlocks into a giant standing wave. Now we have the transfigural, dynamic
flow-line symmetry of reciprocal, bidirectional flow, through which we can
answer that what moves us cannot originate from somewhere specifically
inside or outside our individual bodies, but from everywhere non-locally
including and locally channelled through the receptive spatial pools of our
central identities or zeroids. Power derives not from some forceful, pushing
or pulling point located somewhere ineffable, but the inductive influence of
receptive (i.e. zeroidal) space everywhere. Power comes, via transspace,
from all through all: into somewhere local, from everywhere around, through
its receptive interior and out again, in continual circulation.





Now, we can at last understand our dynamic natural situation, which
transcends the three-dimensional spatial limitations of hard-line symmetry
and objective definition and satisfies the spiritual yearning that many are
aware of deep within us for ‘higher dimensions’.  There is this deep feeling
of both including and being included in an invisible realm permeating
within, without and throughout us and all Nature, without external or
internal limit. In not being accessible to quantification in purely material
terms, and infinite at all scales, hence comprising a set of relative
infinities, this realm may seem ‘mysterious’. But it is mysterious only in
so far that we try to exclude it from our consideration: what is truly
mysterious – paradoxical – is how we could come to imagine that we can
explain anything, let alone everything, without materially including it.



Perhaps it is the ‘concrete jungle’ of urban life that most especially
dispossesses our minds from being in tune with the infinite and reinforces
the definitive imageries and excluded middle logic of static,
space-excluding, Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries. If you grew up in
the Nigerian town where Lere was born – it is a big village really – you
would have been confronted with the awareness of not being alone even when
nobody is around everyday. You would have come back from school with nothing
to eat at home. You would have had to hop to the farm to pick some maize,
alone. And then you would leave the house and walk into the tropical jungle
behind the house. Tropical forest instils fear because you are bombarded
with all kinds of sounds from insects, the all-enveloping majestic presence
of eagles above your head, the chirruping and, is that a wild cat meowing
there or what? You want to run but you don’t. You have to stand your ground
alone in the wild. You are alone. No, you are not alone. You can feel other
presences, yes the warmth of others who are keeping vigil over you and from
whom your courage derives its fillip. It is always like that everywhere. It
is the same everywhere that when you are alone you don’t feel alone. The
thoughts of or about the Other flow into your world as you flow into their
world. One is never alone. You are never alone.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Moira Laidlaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: AA Thread 2 07-08 How do i~we explain our educational
influences in learning to improve our educational influences as
practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations that
dynamically include us?


Alan, I did want to respond to what you wrote - particularly in the paper
with your colleague Lere Shakunle. And I'll say straighgtaway without any
sense of modesty - it's not my besetting sin - that my conceptual grasp of
quantum mechanics and related fields is fairly limited. It's limited to the
wonder of it all. I've been reading about quantum mechanics since my early
twenties; whole swathes of literature - including people like Danar Zohar
and Murray Gell-Man and I've come away with this sense that the meanings
are just around the corner, so enticingly out of my grasp, and yet
something lures me on. And as I read your article with the quotation from
Wordsworth something clicked in a useful way.

If I have your argument right - and please do write and help me on this if
you have the time - any system which we impose upon the flow of life can
result in harm. This can be conveyed through the language that probes
towards something ineffible. Or it can be systems we use to classify and
clarify something. It can be the schooling whose benchmarks include
competition as a way of sifting human achievements and labeling
merit.Another obvious interference is our rape of the planet - as if all
things are reducible to their component parts; that even to speak of
component parts is to miss the point in a big way.

Furthermore, again, if I've understood you, we have become trapped in these
ways of systematising things we are only halfway to understanding, and we
are damaging our latent abilities and talents. By anatomising the universe
we miss what is understood in many eastern ways of seeing: that everything
is intermingled - no, poor word - interfused. Is it so, then, in your way
of understandings things, that the gestalt notion that the whole is in the
part anything of what you are saying? Or have I missed the point?

Why I feel moved to respond to your posting is that your writing helped
something flick a switch on in my mind - more than mind actually - feelings
were very much involved. I have felt for most of my life that things are
not as they appear dualistically. I've looked at a tree and realised, for
example, that in that particular dimension the world felt like being a
tree. And I mean that in all seriousness. It isn't quantifiable, but is no
less valid for that.And the form of consciousness that perceives that
indivisibility, is the one I believe that connects absolutely to what I am
understanding of what you're writing about. Am I right in this assumption?

As far as representing our influences is concerned, like you, I am wary of
language because it makes as well as reports on reality, and thus we are
also the recipients of language's power as a living force. I believe that
words, like values, like perceptions, are living as we know ourselves to be
living.That's what led to my thesis in 1996 - about developmental standards
of judgement - in my field of education but I believe the context doesn't
change the precept.

I think there are connections between what you are saying and what I have
long since believed. It's just your words are better suited to the task.

Thank you so much for illuminating my day. That is, of course, if I've
understood what it is you are writing about. I'd love to hear from you,
Alan.

Love from, Moira