Re: "Feel that I know"
Dear Susie and all,
Just to respond to your question, if not object, what are
we?
We are flow form, dynamic inclusions, not occupiers, of space
and so are not absolutely definable in an unfrozen world, distinct
(identifiable) but not discrete (isolated).
Warmest
Alan
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 04 February 2007 00:56
Subject: Re: "Feel that I know"
Greetings Ted, Lovely to meet
you
“but this view of ‘his behaviour’ does not take into
account that he is included within an evolutionary flow that is beyond his
control”.
I find your whole piece beautiful in its reason
and expression... Thankyou for offering reflections that seem to me to open
again into the feeling of thought that we are generating here. It is so
exciting to know that others are focussing here and have done so much thinking
and exploring... I find it such a difficult subject to open up with people...
There are a couple of things I would dearly like to explore...here ... if you
are interested -
Fist, the cultural languages that may be (may come
into being, have been and that have been forgotten...), for our communication
into ways of being with each other where we feel thought in this way – as a
flow, both beyond our control and of our making – at the same moment....These
may include something of what Sarah, Jack and Alan were talking about –
something about a deep felt commitment to care – care of what? Not sure
that the “of” matters... But also words, and perhaps more felt things like
pacing, leaps and indwellings.... Images too as we started this discussion
with, perhaps other senses.... How can they be brought into cultural
manifestation between us here and now? I would be excited to carry out a
designed interaction on line with you and anyone else who is interested to
explore this...
And what do we perceive of those qualities that you say
we have no control over – do they control us or is control no an issue here?
Either way, what do these qualities of flow/felt thought perceive of us when
they are here? How can we perceive of something without making it the object,
how can we be perceived without ourselves being made object?
If not
object, what are we? Are we made purely of our senses? IE – if we discover
other “sense” are we something different?
I am in a post doctoral
heaven/oblivion, so please forgive me if my interests seem ... Difficult to
schedule
Warmest, Susie
On
3/2/07 8:23 PM, "A.D.M.Rayner" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From:
ted lumley <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: 'A.D.M.Rayner' <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
; 'BERA Practitioner-Researcher' <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Cc: [log in to unmask] ; 'Steve Taylor' <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
; 'Mushin' <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
; 'paul murray' <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 02 February 2007 22:25
Subject: RE: "Feel
that I know"
hi alan, susie,
susie, my hunch is the
same as yours;
My hunch is that we depend
too much on "seeing" which has the cognitive result of turning everything
into an object and distancing us the observer unless we make a big effort to
do otherwise. Other felt senses of knowing, like feeling knowing, could mean
that we have a very different construction of self and our orientation in
the organic world.
many people (most of us?), if you ask them
(if we ask ourselves) ‘are we fully responsible for our own behaviour?’
will respond ‘yes’. and, indeed, our western sense of
justice is founded on the individual being fully responsible for ‘his/her
own behaviour’.
but what if i pose this question to someone who
makes laminate flooring. he may respond ‘yes’, that he is full
control of his own behaviour.
but what is he ‘thinking’ of in
terms of ‘his behaviour’? he is likely thinking of all the
actions that he internally authors, drives and directs, ... whether this
inner sourcing is by his biogenetics, biochemistry, biophysics or by the
structure and processes of his individual psyche. that is, he thinks
of his actions in terms of bringing together certain inputs, transforming
them and outputting them as products together with some unneeded effluents.
that is, he thinks of himself in terms of a ‘productive
machine’, as someone who ‘gets things done’ and whose behaviour is
internally authored, driven and directed.
but does he really
understand ‘his own actions/behaviours’? laminate flooring
contains flame retardants, and flame retardants are concentrating in our
bodies and they are toxins at some level of concentration (this is hard to
assess). so, one aspect of his behaviour that he does not
normally include, because it is not included in a simple
input-transform-output individual-self-as-machine model, is his relationship
with the dynamical space he is included in. evidently, there is
a continuing flow-through of gases, liquids and material substance, by way
of his breathing, drinking, eating (transforming) and expelling of gases,
liquids and material substance.
he is thus included in this
flow; i.e. he is included within a dynamical flowspace.
our
normal model of our ‘self’ ignores our inclusion in a dynamical hosting
flowspace. it starts with what we use, and ends with what we produce,
... and the reservoir from which we take and into which we put, is assumed
to be absolutely separate (mutually excluded) from our sovereign existence
and independent internally authored, driven and directed behaviour.
that’s how we have come to consume locally at a greater-than-naturally
sustainable rate, and when we locally over-graze or deplete/pollute the
local water supply (or petroleum supplies) etc., we (with the most locally
non-sustaining social dynamics) are ‘forced to’ extend the range of our
acquisition of resources to sustain our rate of consumption.
‘sustainability’ thus refers to sustaining our social
dynamic in the manner to which we have become accustomed.
this
machine model, by which we believe we are responsible for our own behaviour,
and therefore, that we understand our own behaviour, thus ‘twists off’ from
the reality of natural limits to sustainability.
what does it
mean to say that we are responsible for our own behaviour if we do not
understand our own behaviour? if we ‘know not what we
do’?
the man in the cart on the way to the guillotine also
maintains that ‘he possesses free will’ and that he is in control of his own
behaviour and he can get up and dance a jig and sing a song of his choosing
any time he chooses to. but this view of ‘his behaviour’ does
not take into account that he is included within an evolutionary flow that
is beyond his control. thus, his understanding of ‘his
behaviour’ is this ‘machine’ type understanding, as is the case with the
laminate floor maker. it is a gross over-simplification (with a good
deal of utility as long as we do not forget that it is gross
over-simplification) that occludes our intuitive, feeling-experience based
understanding of being included within a spatial-relational evolutionary
flow-dynamic.
so, so long as we continue to think of our
behaviour in terms of ‘machine behaviour’ that is disjoint from the
dynamical space we are included in, we shall be sourcing dysfunction since
‘what we think we are doing’ is radically incomplete by its ignoring of the
interdependence between our individual behaviour and the dynamic of the
hostspace we are included in (bohm calls this ‘gap’ in understanding
‘incoherence’).
ciaoforniao,
ted
-----Original
Message-----
From: A.D.M.Rayner [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 12:42 AM
To: BERA
Practitioner-Researcher
Cc: Ted Lumley; [log in to unmask]; Steve
Taylor; Mushin; paul murray
Subject: Re: "Feel that I
know"
Dear Susie,
Yes, that's exactly the point I
was making: to 'see with feeling' it is
necessary to perceive the
'space', not just the fixed frame perspective of
the 'viewfinder' that
leads to objectifiction. This is the essence of
inclusional experience
and what enables a crowd to flow by orienting with
the ever transforming
current (present shape of space) rather than
dislocated 'objects'. When
we're in objective, rationalistic 'see only'
mode, we 'wrong foot one
another' like calculating machines on collision
course; when we're in
'see with feeling' mode we glide easily around one
another. My friend Ted
Lumley has written extensively about this: see
www.goodshare.org. And my
'how pure eyesight can dislocate your knee'
exercise is also intended to
reveal it.
Yes, we do in a sense have sixth and seventh senses
- those that feel
invisible 'gravity' and 'warmth', but they're not
associated with explicit
organs on the outside of our bodies (ears, eyes,
nose, tongue, skin) and so
get taken for granted, rather than being
understood as vital to our
inclusional 'proprioception' as Margarida
Dolan attests - our sense of
self-location in the gravitational and
thermal (i.e. receptive spatial)
field. They are also vital to our
emotional experience of the loving
presence of absence, pervading all,
known to some as God, Holy Ghost,
Brahman, Dao etc. When we know this
presence, we no longer believe in 'the
ghost in the machine', the
internal executive that declares us to be
independent from Nature, with
our very own 'free will'. Neither do we
believe in
determinism.
The poem below is about
this.
As Mohsen might put it, may you enjoy the warm
pool of gravitational
reception, where darkness is vital for our natural
neighbourhood!
Darkest warmth of heavenly laughter in
which the Devil may come to care and
be cared
for,
Alan
---------------------------------------------
BEYOND
OBJECTIFICTION
You ask me who you are
To tell a story you
can live your life by
A tail that has some point
That you can
see
So that you no longer
Have to feel so pointless
Because what
you see is what you get
If you don't get the meaning of my
silence
Because you ain't seen nothing yet
You ask me for
illumination
To cast upon your sauce of doubt
Regarding what your life
is all about
To find a reason for existence
That separates the
wrong
From righteous answer
In order to cast absence out
To some
blue yonder
Where what you see is what you get
But you don't get the
meaning of my darkness
Because you ain't seen nothing
yet
You look around the desolation
Of a world your mined
strips bare
You ask of me in desperation
How on Earth am I to
care?
I whisper to stop telling stories
In abstract words and
symbols
About a solid block of land out there
In which you make
yourself a declaration
Of independence from thin air
Where what you
see is what you get
When you don't get the meaning of my present
absence
Because you ain't seen nothing yet
You ask of me
with painful yearning
To resolve your conflicts born of
dislocation
From the context of an other world out where
Your soul can
wonder freely
In the presence of no heir
Where what you see is what
you get
When you don't get the meaning of my absent presence
Because
you ain't seen nothing yet
You ask me deeply and
sincerely
Where on Earth can you find healing
Of the yawning gap
between emotion
And the logic setting time apart from motion
In a
space caught in a trap
Where what you see is what you
get
And in a thrice your mind is reeling
Aware at last of
your reflection
In a place that finds connection
Where your inside
becomes your outside
Through a lacy curtain lining
Of fire, light upon
the water
Now your longing for solution
Resides within and
beyond your grasp
As the solvent for your solute
Dissolves the
illusion of your past
And present future
Now your heart
begins to thunder
Bursting hopeful with affection
Of living light for
loving darkness
Because you ain't felt no thing
yet
-----
Original Message -----
From: Susan Goff <[log in to unmask]>
To:
<[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 01 February
2007 21:47
Subject: Re: "Feel that I know"
>
Thanks Alan - yes understand about seeing things as a whole - but I
am
> trying to understand something other than seeing (visually or
cognitively)
> for a moment, more like an embodied sense of "feeling"
knowing - in the
> moment of recognition that Jack identified.... It
is very hard to put
> accurately into words so please forgive me....
If I can dwell on this
sense,
> integrating it into seeing might
come later. My hunch is that we depend
too
> much on "seeing" which
has the cognitive result of turning everything into
> an object and
distancing us the observer unless we make a big effort to do
>
otherwise. Other felt senses of knowing, like feeling knowing, could
mean
> that we have a very different construction of self and our
orientation in
> the organic world. Susie
>
>
> On
1/2/07 7:00 PM, "A.D.M.Rayner" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
> > Dear Susie and All,
> >
> >
Welcome back into the stream, the water's lovely!
> >
> >
Ah yes! But really to feel the stream, there is a need to view
the
picture
> > as a hole.
> >
> >
>
> Warmest
> >
> > Alan
> >
>
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Susan Goff
<[log in to unmask]>
> > To:
<[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: 01
February 2007 00:58
> > Subject: "Feel that I know"
>
>
> >
> >> "I look at the picture as a whole and
feel that I 'know'
> >> from personal experience the material
context"
> >>
> >>
> >> Dear Jack and
everyone..
> >> I just want to pay attention to this line that
you wrote.
> >>
> >> I want to slow down, and
explore what that "knowing" is. I don't think
we
> >> "know"
enough about it and I think it is a potentially whole source of
> >
human
> >> thought and ontology.
> >>
>
>> When you say this, I connect with you, in understanding that sense
of
> >> recognition - of experience that is on the one hand
completely unique
and
> > on
> >> the other
inalienable from all human experience, like a wondrous cosmic
>
>> tendril that winds through us, is of us and we make it what it
is,
across
> >> all time and geography even though our
cultures of knowing would lose
> > sight
> >> of this
extraordinary human right of existence.
> >>
> >> I
am reminded of Alan's beautiful reference to Wordsworth in his
> >
manuscript
> >> which I am currently reading:
>
>>
> >> "In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing
defined into absolute
> >> independent singleness"
>
>>
> >> (Forgive me Alan for quoting your reference, I
will be quoting you when
I
> > am
> >> finished with
the read!).
> >>
> >> So, in reference to this
discussion about the power of images to
> > communicate
>
>> knowledge, I wanted to dwell on knowledge not as information, but
as
this
> >> living stream of a thing we call experience, and
note how rich a pool
that
> >> is once we sense it "bodily"
and culturally alive within and around
us -
> > and
>
>> to advocate for a significant turning towards understanding it
and
making
> >> "it" the ground in which we are....
>
>>
> >> Logically (instinctively), it is perhaps the most
accurate form of
> > knowledge
> >> with which to sense
the state of our ecology (sociological and
> >
environmental
> >> etc etc) - and potentially the road
back/towards being in nature again.
> >>
> >> Lovely
to be in the stream with you guys again
> >> Susie
>
>>
> >> On 25/1/07 6:59 PM, "Jack Whitehead"
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >>
> >>>
?
> >>
>