JISCMail - PRACTITIONER-RESEARCHER Archives

Dear Alan, and anyone who's following this:

I do agree about the difference between being 'tied together' and 'true communion'. I've sent you a picture of my painting 'Rock-Climbers', who incidentally are not tied together, in it there is communion. (I have a problem using my OCMS.ac.uk mail as it doesn't take large emails. I should change it if possible.)

Cross-Purposes - The Trinity of the Complex Self
Alan, I found this piece of writing amazing. I came to Christianity late in life. I was about to say ‘without the baggage’, but of course I DO have baggage, having been raised in a Christian society. And I came late because of my perceived criticisms of the Christian society that harboured wrongdoers, and even let them thrive in their midst. I am talking about abuses within the church, power imbalances and abuse of power. One of my case studies relates how a woman whose child was sexually abused within the church was herself made the outcast, the rejected one. While the perpetrator thrived with his reputation intact.

I too, (and especially as a woman) suffered from the dominance of someone else’s interpretations, foisted onto me by rote, and your example of the victim’s double-bind, with its ‘forgive – only forgive’, without the true reconcilation is a good example. Thank you for sharing your experience of being confronted with the Self-denying symbolism of ‘I’ crossed out. It is well put. It marks that important dynamic, of ‘trying to be good’, often at great personal cost; it is about control. It isn’t meant to be like that! (Not that I've got it all worked out, you understand.)

You ask, “What if the symbolic implication of the Cross is not the altruistic annihilation of the ‘I’ Self? What if it represents the compassionate inclusion by and of the ‘I’ Self, through its holey centre and interfacial bodily boundaries, of complementary dynamic potentials? Would that make a difference to the way we relate to one another, other life forms and our living space?’

Yes, I guess so, if I understand you correctly, but what of the, ‘whoever would gain his life must lose it’? This too transfigures. I can’t pretend to fully understand it, but I don’t think it refers to giving in to bullies. But I do think it has something to do with a loving attitude towards those who despitefully use us. There is a strange ‘something’ that happens at a time like that. Not that I always practice it, nor that I feel that I get anywhere with it always, yet this attitude a) transforms me and b) may transform them!

Your idea of ‘mutually shaping and reciprocally transforming inner and outer through intermediary spatial domains’ reminds me of a gestalt; which makes me think of seeing both sides of an argument at one and the same time. I’ve done a painting of ‘Crib Goch’, an arete on one of the mountains leading to Snowdon. This footpath that traces the very top of the line of the mountain is hazardous; one has to keep one’s balance and see both sides at the same time. Or else!

‘Many too have been the political and academic careers stalled by orthodoxy when they have sought to bring the iniquities of the law of the excluded middle to light. ‘ and so did Polanyi when he thought his elders and betters, colleagues and others asserted that they were being objective in their scientific decision-making.

‘What is it, then, that orthodoxy finds so unpalatable about this view of Self as Neighbourhood - dynamic relational place rather than dislocated individual subject or object? Does it necessarily end in catastrophe, or is it a means of avoiding catastrophe? Does it inspire love or hate? Is it healing or damaging? Does it bring us together or force us apart’ Why is it either/or; why not both/and? Because, instead of the comparing and measuring, there is legitimate difference. I think some Christian places work like this and don't disrespect 'self as neighbourhood'.

I too have feared the discovery that I am the ‘source of sin, weakness and vulnerability’ indeed I own up to that, yet am also reconciled to it in some curious, paradoxical way that gives me added creativity. I remember realising that when I did a painting of Medusa with Pegasus. Here the reconcilation between hatred and death, with love and compassion, through creativity. So here again I echo you, ‘it can actually be the wellspring of loving and respectful compassion.’ Isn’t it paradoxical that we both find ourselves at this place through different means?

Your paintings didn’t appear in my document unfortunately.

Dear Christine and all,

Yes, in many ways there is very close correspondence. But I also would point to what I think is a very important distinction between the material connectedness or 'contiguity' of being 'tied together', and the dynamic continuity or true communion of being pooled together, gravitationally, 'in common space'.

I'm attaching a chapter from 'Inclusional Nature' concerning this question.

Let me clarify this before going any further. I couldn't honestly call myself Christian and I don't ascribe to any particular orthodox belief system that is not grounded in evidence or
sound reason (and that includes objectivist science!). But I do recognise what I take to be a dynamic inclusional (i.e 'spiritual/spatial/immaterial/non-local/omnipresent') core in the origination of many faiths. This is associated with values of love, compassion and respect for natural neighbourhood that are expressed in various versions of 'the golden rule' yet often denied in the 'living contradiction of orthodox practice.

----- Original Message -----

From: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]"> STANDING, Christine

To: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]"> [log in to unmask]

Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 9:56 AM

Subject: Re: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk' (fwd)

This was of interest to me because in a recent seminar I've just discussed a drawing of mine called 'Rock-Climbers'. A mass of people are climbing crags; they are all attached to one another in some way or other. They all relate. So your essay chimes well with my ideas.

What is 'transfigurality'?

I guess your explanations are what I'd define as humanist? One of my explanations of ‘Rock-climbers’ is that it demonstrates a system, the 'body of Christ' as Christians call it, seen as a system. A system of interrelating, in the picture each person is in physical contact with another. ie

4Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.’ Romans 12:3-5 (New International Version.Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society Zondervan)

Of course, this begins with the statement, ‘3 Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you’. This drawing, I think in retrospect, is in accordance with this; this is my theological reflection on it. Not all can, as one of the figures is doing, support several at once (as does our Dean!) The child, the infirm, the deformed, cannot physically support others; yet they also have their place ‘in the team’. During the seminar two people mentioned ‘Arthur’. I don't know whether you saw it, about the value of the disabled. Popular television might name and categorise some in the team as ‘the weakest link’, yet this quote asserts value for all human souls.

Are these views in keeping with yours?

Following up on this, I have written the attached short essay.

Warmest

Alan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Rayner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 11:30 AM
Subject: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk'
(fwd)

> Dear All,
>
> I have just sent the following (now slightly revised) message to the
> inclusional research discussion group.
>
> I feel it may have much relevance to how really to understand the
> difference between natural educational inclusion and unnatural selection.
>
> Perhaps we need to let go of the junk thinking that lures us into
> rubbishing ourselves and one another!
>
> Warmest
>
> Alan
>
>
> ------------ Forwarded Message ------------
> Date: 10 April 2008 08:38 +0100
> From: "Alan Rayner (BU)" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk'
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Ted Lumley's impassioned missive regarding the relation between the notion
> of 'Junk DNA' and prevalent ideas about 'junk people' draws attention to
> what I think is the most fundamental social, psychological and
> environmental implication of inclusionality:
>
> In a continually evolving energy flow, there is no such thing as 'junk'.
> Neither is there any such thing as individual 'perfection' in isolation
> from others.
>
> The very idea of 'junk' arises from the kind of favouritism evident in
> Darwin's description of 'natural selection' as 'the preservation of
> favoured races in the struggle for life'.
>
> Such favouritism is the product of rationalistic exclusion, most
> fundamentally of all the exclusion of 'space' from 'matter', such that
> only
> the latter 'counts', as in the discreteness/discontinuity embedded in the
> simplistic foundations of classical and modern mathematics and objectivist
> science. It produces a very partial, postscriptive and prescriptive view
> of
> history and evolution in which only the 'big hitters' count and there is
> no
> play in the system for improvisational co-creativity. It leads inexorably
> to eugenics and the motivations for fascism. It alienates the loving
> influence of receptive spatial context that makes evolution possible in
> the
> first place. It negates negativity in a misogynistic 'false positivism'
> that denies our natural source.
>
> This is why it is so crucial for us to develop and communicate the kinds
> of
> mathematics and physics based on transfigurality, and evolutionary
> understanding based on natural inclusion, that can help us out of the fix
> of producing more and more junk by objective definition.
>
> Everest isn't the only mountain in the Himalayas. The Great White isn't
> the
> only fish in the sea. The solute isn't alone in the solution. Alone, stuck
> on top of the pyramidal adaptive peaks of their ascendent architecture,
> they are going nowhere fast.
>
> The simplisticity of favouritism not only produces junk, it is junk! And
> our rationalistic modern human culture of perversely discontinuous flow is
> full of it!
>
> Warmest
>
>
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