Hello Alan,

I loved your Wight musings.... knowing the scenes you paint so well ..... As a boy I wandered Wight when it was safe to get lost and ask the way.... then we honeymooned near Ventnor wandering the Downs and cliffs.... took our children and surfed on the west coast....... Hazel even cycled up the Hill to Military Road down into Compton..... while I had to walk!

One day I hope to return with watercolours.......

Brian

From: Alan Rayner (BU) <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, 11 September, 2009 13:00:11
Subject: Re: Infinite depth

Dear Shelley,

Aha! There speaks the voice of coherence in the natural communion of receptive space!

'Co-incidentally', please find attached my 'Wight linings' !!

Warmest

Alan

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

From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" rel=nofollow target=_blank ymailto="mailto:[log in to unmask]">Shelley Tracey

To: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" rel=nofollow target=_blank ymailto="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]

Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 11:42 AM

Subject: Re: Infinite depth

Alan, I love this idea. Another poem to add to the idea of depth and reflective space

Coherence

What is tenuous lets meaning through.

The moon burns through the porous urban night.

I like the stillness of the sleeping houses;

they all make sense.

In the morning, I feel resistant.

This intense new sky imagines me somewhere else, or in a painting,

always stopping to look, not having to move on.

Leaves edged with frost so perfectly specific: one statement at a time.

The outsides and insides of things

may not recognise each other,

but it seems as if at last we’re less uncertain.

(published in Ulla’s Nib, 8, 2009):

Shelley Tracey

Shelley Tracey
Essential Skills Programme Coordinator
School of Education
Queen's University Belfast
20 College Green
Belfast BT7 1LN

0044 (0) 28 90975196 (phone)
0044 (0) 28 90971084 (fax)
Website: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEducation/ProspectiveStudents/EssentialSkills/

From: Practitioner-Researcher [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alan Rayner (BU)
Sent: 11 September 2009 11:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Infinite depth

Dear All,

I have just returned from a delightful four day holiday in the Isle of Wight, where I wrote lots of poems about natural diversity... only to find that poetry has been featuring quite a bit on this list recently!

I was also alerted by some other correspondence to people's possible sensitivity to the language of 'abyss', with its fearful rationalistic associations, that I have written to this group about recently. There is always this danger, when trying to relate inclusional thought to rationalistic concepts, of opening up more scope for confusion and fearful rejection instead of building bridges. I immediately reflected that a very different sense of the significance of this omnipresence could emerge through speaking about 'infinite depth' than 'abyss' - important as it is to 'face' our rationalistic perceptions of the latter.

This led me to write the attached poem, this morning, and also to make a revision to the 'why it matters' page at www.inclusionality.org as follows:

"It is the receptive space throughout that is the natural source of dynamic influence, the infinite depth of being that inspires the creative expression of all forms of becoming

For many, fear of this depth as the 'void' or 'abyss' may make them shy away from inclusionality, seeking the safety of a sharp horizon where darkness ends and light begins, only for this imaginary discontinuity to suppress creativity and induce conflict.

Deep inclusional wisdom springs from the transfigural ability to include oneself dynamically in infinite depth and infinite depth in oneself.

We can hence think of local bodily forms not as discrete 'particles of matter', but as fluid-lined 'capsules' of receptive space in receptive space"

Quite often it has occurred to me that a good way of introducing this inclusional perception of infinite depth is through the image of a figure placed between two parallel mirrors. Much though we might 'desire' rationalistically to put a 'stop' to the recurrence of the figure at ever diminishing scales, we have no realistic grounds for doing so. A similar story occurs with the Mandelbrot set - even though, as Lere Shakunle would confirm, fractal geometry is not deep enough (i.e. it lacks the continuity) to account adequately for the variety of natural flow-form (it still imposes a discrete Euclidean Limit around a 'whole object' and proceeds to dissect this into fractional 'pieces' or 'fragments').

As ever, I am posting this because of what I feel to be the deep correspondence between inclusionality and living educational theory. I continue to be dismayed by how difficult it is to convey the profound simplicity of inclusionality and its radical implications for how we live, love and learn. Maybe the phrase 'infinite depth' can help to convey what needs to be appreciated if we are truly to be liberated from 'the crippling mutilations' of objective definition that have so dominated rationalistic thought and teaching for millennia. The current rush to 'holism' that is currently so evident is, in my view, only a stepping stone to this depth, and one on which it is all too easy to get stuck just as badly as we ever have been.

Warmest

Alan