Patterns within thought

[emile]

carol, ... with respect to your following comment;

“Without having at the ready all the descriptive words which you have used to describe the host-space, or acoustic space inclusional experience, it is something that I discovered for myself a long time ago, and in one respect it has made my life much richer, yet, I have long lived with the feeling of being a little whorl, and sometimes, feelings of living outside of the conventional view of life.”


yes, it is hard not to acknowledge that we are included in the world in a very intimately interconnected way, as the report on the drugs that we ‘engineer’ that cycle through us and our water supply to effect the fish (and therefore lifecycles that are woven into the life-cyle of the fish etc.). clearly, we are participants in ‘co-evolution’ and it is a misnomer to speak of species as ‘evolving’ this is today’s heresy in biology, wherein biologists such as doug caldwell ask whether the ‘organism is the environment’, and relativity would suggest that it must be (there is only transformation of the spatial distribution (geometro-dynamics) of energy, .. matter being a secondary abstraction associated with persisting patterns of energy resonance.). if we take the position that the ‘fluid’ aspect of nature is primary and the material objects are ‘features’ of this spatial-relational energy fluidflow, then we will indeed be ‘stuck for words’ since our language orients to the objectified world of visual space which orients to the actions and transactions of objects in seemingly empty space. that is, the notion of ‘space-as-a-containing-theatre/playing-field’ arises hand-in-hand with the notion of dynamics in terms of the actions and transactions of objects (space is reverse-engineered as the place wherein objects act and interact).

in the case of the fish effected by chemicals dissolved in the water that cycles through our bodies and through the bodies of fish and other creatures, ... we might better think of the water being there first and humans and fish and other creatures being the ones ‘doing the cycling through’. this is certainly to the point of this forum of ‘patterns within thought’.

scientists resisted the idea of plate tectonics for a long time, since this is one of the inversions where we are forced to abandon ‘solid ground’ as our reference. even then, while we speak of the movement of rocky continents are they are being continuously recycled, one must ask, ... ‘what is the invariant in this system?, ... what is it that persists and provides a reference for these dynamics, and one would have to say ‘the shape of space’; i.e. the sphere within which the swirling rocky and watery and airy stuff that we normally think of as ‘the earth’ continues to enfold into itself. why then put so much emphasis on the matter of the earth rather than its spatial shape? the innovators in geophysics, such as tuzo wilson, did not constrain their thinking in this way; e.g.

"April 12, 1968, in Philadelphia," Kevin Burke recalls, "Wilson told his American Philosophical Society audience that if you look at a map of the world you can see oceans opening in some places and closing in others. He therefore suggested that, because the ocean basins make up the largest areas of Earth's surface, it would be appropriate to interpret earth history in terms of the life cycles of the opening and the closing of the ocean basins."

in other words, the shape of space can be seen as more primary than the things (continents) that come and go within it. this is consistent with the teachings of lao-tsu, a contemporary of heraclitus, both of whom saw ‘flow’ as being more primary to reality than ‘the things in the flow’. lao tsu wrote ”The spirit of the valley never dies. This is called the mysterious woman. The gateway of the mysterious woman is called the root of heaven and earth. Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there, yet use will never drain it. Know the male but keep the role of the female.

and so it is with the shape of the ocean basins (a finite and unbounded shape, ... a valley that accommodates the asserting continents. the transforming valley shape is the mother of the continents, ... continents are born and die while the valley, without which we could not speak of these ‘objects’ we call ‘continents’, ... lives on. do the continents ‘move’ or does the global ocean basin valley transform? they are mutually defining, are they not, ... but as we know, ‘continents’ are merely ‘flow-features’ that are transient in nature and it is only our objectifying of these flow-features that makes them appear solid and foundational.

could we seriously speak about ‘evolution of the species’ without speaking of the evolving shape of the global ocean basin and the associated fragmenting and re-welding of continents?

visually, we observe ‘that which moves’ but the shape of the valley, the space that engulfs, being one persisting spatial-relational hole, simply ‘transforms’. when the rock rolls down the mountain, it leaves a hole where it started off from, a local ‘deepening’in the shape of the valley. a local deepening that may fill with water, that may provide a vessel for cultivating life. evidently, the transforming shape of the valley, the reciprocal to the rock rolling down the mountain makes a difference, ... yet our patterns of thought are such as to focus on the assertive actions of the rolling rock rather than the transformation of space which this represents. language can help us to say; ‘it is a large and very heavy rock with jagged edges and it is travelling very fast, hitting and knocking down trees on its way to coming to rest in a small stream. this is a nice, explicit time based story in terms ‘what things do’ but what about the hole in space it opened up where new life is beginning to grow and what about the hole/stream-channel it plugged up, causing the stream-flow to back up over its banks and flood the lowlands etc. etc?

as individuals, our focus on ourselves is in this same context as the rolling rock, we focus on ‘what we do’ ignoring for the most part the reciprocal transformation of space aspects. though we each write our resumés in terms of ‘what we have done’, ... each ‘position’ we leave opens up an endless cascade of change as others move into it and still others move into the ‘positions’ they have vacated, ... and the ‘position’ we move into is then ‘plugged’ like the stream channel plugged by the rock, and others hoping to move into it abandon that ‘flow-channel’ (overflow its banks) and move on elsewhere. this principle of mutually-defining asserting-accommodating is evidently at work even in the simple game of pool or on the crowded freeway where, when one asserts into a ‘space’, one simultaneously ‘opens a space’. so the transformation of space is a far more comprehensive way to understand the evolution of the world dynamic than is the actions and transactions of objects as if in empty space. in particular, it is purely spatial and there is no dependency on ‘time’.


... continued below....

[emile]

... continued from above....

in particular, it [the transformation of space] is purely spatial and there is no dependency on ‘time’.

the classic film ‘its a wonderful life’ (jimmy stewart) is a persisting favourite because it examines the reciprocal transformation-of-space influence of an individual’s life, ... an individual who was troubled by his shortfalls on his resumé as to his rolling rock performance, but whose behaviour was guided by opening up accommodative space for others. the ‘moral of the story’ is that our transformative influence on the accommodative quality of our hostspace is more important than the assertive accomplishments that we can inventory on our resumés, but it is no surprise that films of this nature are a rarity in our visual space oriented ‘scientific’ culture. that is, mathematical physics and the engineering achievements that have come from it, have derived from generalized ‘rolling rock’ laws that describe the nature of a diverse multiplicity of objectified name-labelled entities and what they do relative to absolute space and absolute (universal) time. people have been bound up within these scientific rolling-rock projects and have thus become part of the rolling aggregate that is focused on ‘doing’ and ‘getting things done’ without seriously contemplating the ‘flip-side’ acoustic space view in terms of how the accommodating quality of space is being transformed; e.g. how mass of rock that is put into the stream for the hydro-electric project dis-accommodates the salmon migration which itself is an accommodator for many other life-cycles which are in turn accommodators for many other life-cycles etc. etc. only when major salmon runs have been destroyed do we realize ‘what we had’ that did not make it into our one-sided assertive engineering plans.

so, yes, we are reactionary because we have not appreciated the natural primacy of ‘the valley’, ... the ‘accommodative’ (yin, female) aspect of the yin/yang quality of nature whose inner-outer geometro-dynamics are more ‘acoustically experience’ than ‘visibly perceived’.

as the spiritual gurus like eckhart tolle (‘the power of now’) point out, being in-the-timeless-space-of-the-continuing-now is where true awareness and experience is. it is where our behaviour is inner-outer space-guided. on the other hand, the extent to which our behaviour is driven one-sidedly by internal purpose derived from time-based plans is commensurate with our opting out of our natural awareness and becoming ‘semi-conscious’. there is no ‘catching up with hostspace evolution’ in our time-based visual space constructivism (genetic determinism approach). meanwhile, our space-guided behaviour, translated into visual-space sequential-time realm, appears as if it were anticipatory and synchronicitous.

as psychiatrists such as r.d. laing have suggested, ‘normality’ in our culture is a condition of unconsciousness and alienation of our natural experience and that psychosis (often termed a condition of hyper-awareness [that was respected and admired in ancient poetic cultures].) in which we dissolve our boundaries and our ego, is naturally healing. our challenge, as in the ‘eagle learning’ tradition of the native american, seems to be to have our ego continually dissolving and being reborn in a stable and continuing rather than jerky manner. insofar as we enslave ourselves as assertive accomplishment ‘line items’ in the rolling rock resumé of our society, there is no such possibility.

[Carol Massey]

[emile]:as psychiatrists such as r.d. laing have suggested, ‘normality’ in our culture is a condition of unconsciousness and alienation of our natural experience and that psychosis (often termed a condition of hyper-awareness [that was respected and admired in ancient poetic cultures].) in which we dissolve our boundaries and our ego, is naturally healing. our challenge, as in the ‘eagle learning’ tradition of the native american, seems to be to have our ego continually dissolving and being reborn in a stable and continuing rather than jerky manner. insofar as we enslave ourselves as assertive accomplishment ‘line items’ in the rolling rock resumé of our society, there is no such possibility.

This is beautiful emile! I have to digest all this and let it perk for a little time.....

as always, thanks.

[Carol Massey]

this is the topic i was referring to hoopoe. 

(emile, if you are still being notified of responses to this topic, i've simply given it a gentle nudge upward for our new friend, hoopoe, to read if she feels inclined to do so)

[Dancer]

I am replying to you mail! 

[Carol Massey]

thank you! it's nice to know that the mail gets through! 

[Carol Massey]

this is an inquiry   

last night i read an article in discover magazine suggesting that 'dark matter' may not in fact be true.  quite frankly, i'm not going to attempt to explain what 'new idea' might over-ride the implication that dark matter exists at all.... because a dream i had last night informed me that there are dark spots in my knowing.. (in the dream i was looking into a mirror and my nose (knows, aka, gnosis) did, in fact, have very dark spots in a well organized pattern dispersed evenly across the entirety of my nose).

i'm wondering that if science stamps as valid the idea that dark matter does not exist, that it may then be an indicator of the extreme imbalance to which we have gone to accentuate the masculine assertive, yang as real, and the abolishment of the dark feminine (space), yin, as a participant that accomodates and/or conditions and nurtures,  in the service of balancing spiral galaxies (and all things included)... so it shall become even moreso remote in our collective mind, enhancing our collective drift from balance to the one-sidedness of yang asserting that objects are moved from their own centers....

now i may be 180 degrees south of perceiving this accurately, but at least, i can veto my inhibitions (of ignorance), and put it here that it might generate some discussion by those who are better informed scientifically than me.

carol   

[emile]

science concedes that ‘matter’ is ‘schaumkommen’ (schroedinger), a secondary feature of the dynamics of the purely spatial-relational energy-field-flow that is nature (by matter-energy-equivalence, matter is a local flow-form concentration of energy within the evolviing field-flow-space. / /

but old habits and old jargon and old explicit formulations die hard, ... and the concept of ‘matter’ in terms of ‘geometric objects’ with ‘center-points’ marking their ‘location’ and their ability to ‘change locations’ etc. is still the mainstay of how science describes energy field-flow dynamics that are innately beyond the capacity of models based on material object with persisting identity.   as kepler said, it is science's habitude to use that which is most simple rather than that which is most true. / /

there can be no persisting object identities in a flow-field.   thus, to give a ‘flow-field-versus-object-identity’ analogy, though we speak of ‘hurricane katrina’ as a personified object with a persisting identity, she is innately ‘spatial-relational’, a continuously transforming flow-form, as are all objects within an energy flow-field that has no foundation in atomic particles, but only in spatial-relationally evolving energy concentrating. / /

given this, when we look at a spiral galaxy, it is the medium (flow) that should be the message, rather than the lumps of content.  the content should be regarded as beads of energy concentration, flow-forms that are continuously forming and re-forming. / /

but our habit is to put ‘objects first’ and to ‘attach meaning to the objects’ after the fact of decreeing their existence and ‘giving them persisting identity’; e.g. we first 'decree their existence' and then endow them with kinetic energy etc. as if their motion were ‘their own’. / /

as psychologists such as j.j. gibson, and lev vygotsky have noted, this ‘attachment of meaning’ to the object is backwards.   there is always a spatial-relational developmental way of giving meaning to an entity without ‘objectifying it’.    thus the identity of katrina could relate back to the nonlocal flows that INFER her identity, rather than starting from her ‘eye’ which we impute to be ‘HER center’ and thus to impute HER persisting-object-identity, which gives us a foundational base (‘existence’) to which we can ‘attach meaning’. / /

vygotsky called the naturally evolving experience based meaning-giving ‘geneticheskii’ and through his research into how we form concepts, he explains that our creating objects as foundation for meaning-giving happens through language and that in order to share meaning from our life experience with others, we use language as a ‘consciousness for others’ and it then becomes, at the same time, an intellectual consciousness for myself, which is an innately lesser thing than our inclusional experience in the evolving space of the continuing present. / /

we invent words just as we invent objects, from our experience and how we are induced to respond to things.  for example, if we are tired and we see some structure that we can sit down and rest on, ... just like the coke-bottle in ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’, this entity induces us to behave in a certain way, i.e. we pull it over and sit on it.   it is the evolution of the experience that gives meaning to this entity, but when we invent an absolute object identity for it; i.e. ‘this is a chair’, .... then we follow this up by attaching meaning to the object; i.e. defining what a ‘chair is’, as if the ‘chair’ is an object that exists in its own right ignoring the originating context of its inclusion in the evolutionary dynamics of our experience.    people get serious about this attached meaning when we reach for what we think is bench-like chair in someone else’s home, they may get excited and tell us that it is a prized coffee table and that we can’t sit on that. / /

further examples are nation-objects.  the natives say that ‘canada’ and ‘the united states’ are simply ‘kingdoms in the mind’ of european white men, that they take their meaning from how the colonizing europeans fought over and divided up what they had stolen; i.e. 'canada' and 'the united states' as 'political objects' have no meaning in their own independent right.   but the european mind first decrees their ‘objecthood’ (self-contained identity) and then proceeds to attach meaning to the object by rituals that sustain belief in the imaginary and with symbolic tools like flags and anthems. / /

this is a general technique (psychological) for extracting from the hostspace dynamic what is inherently inextricable, and so it goes for the beads of energy concentration in the spiral galaxy of the milky way.  it is a form of consciousness-for-you (way of sharing meaning) that becomes a[n intellectual] consciousness-for-me, ... and leaves behind the deeper inclusional experience based understanding in terms of flow-formings in the spatial-relational evolutionary dynamic. / /

personifying/objectifying the whorl in our bathtub or personifying/objectifying hurricane katrina and developing a whole scheme of ‘attached meaning’ based on the objectification of the unobjectifiable provides a shareable consciousness that starts with the existence of objects and ‘what they do’ over time or ‘what we do with them’ over time.  that is, ‘object behaviours’ happen ‘over time’.  had we instead made our reality out of ‘space’ (energy-field-flow) that is capable of spatial-relational transformation, there would be no ‘here we have objects that exist’, .. now they are changing in location (the action of objects), now they are bumping into one another (object transactions, interactions) etc. etc.   all we would have if space was the grounding would be ‘spatial-relational transformation’ as is suggested by relativity and quantum wave theory. / /

if we buy into relativity and quantum theory then we, the observer, are not really an ‘observer’ since that connotes a fixed vantage point of perception based ‘identity’, ... we are instead an ‘experient’ made of the same transforming energy-field-flow spatial-relationships as we are experiencing; i.e. our consciousness is a continuously evolving flow-field rather than an archive of objectified thought-objects. / /

as vygotsky points out, there is no need to take our object-based, attached-meaning ‘consciousness for others’ (and thus intellectual consciousness for self) as the primary consciousness.  we may recognize that our consciousness is layered like the geological deposition on the earth (continuous inner-outer flow) and that we have access to the older depositional sequences at the same time as the newer depositional sequences; i.e. we have access to the continuing transformation of space which includes everything (natural reality is spatial transformation rather than a linear temporal sequence of object-based causal transactions).  objects only age if we think in terms of objects with persisting identity, ... 'space transforms' is a bigger idea which has no need of the linear-temporal aging of objects, objects being our ‘kingdoms-of-the-mind’, beliefs that we make up and attach meaning to and defend, like ‘hurricane katrina’ or 'canada' or 'the united states'. / /

once we commit to ‘the falsehood’ of making ‘objects’ foundational, it is as if we have to keep making up new lies to explain things in the object paradigm; e.g. ‘dark matter’.  / /

we never have to depend upon material object structures in an evolutionary energy-flow-field dynamic, there is always the ‘geneticheskii’ way of meaning-giving.  as robert pirsig says in ‘the zen of motorcycle maintenance’; / /

[i]"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind — number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it — .I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! — Ghosts. / /

"That's really what Phædrus was talking about when he said it's all in the mind. It sounds insane when you just jump up and say it without reference to anything specific like an engine. But when you tie it down to something specific and concrete, the insane sound tends to disappear and you see he could have been saying something of importance."[/i]

[Carol Massey]

hello emile,

thank you for responding, and particularly for sharing this description of 'kingdoms of the mind'.  i recall watching a movie several months ago titled, 'kingdom of conscience', and it impressed me that it was like saying 'kingdom of conscious'.  in the movie, priests inform a man that his dead wife was evil and will go to hell.... her head must be cut off before burying her.  the man (her husband) takes this in, and as the priests are leaving, he says (speaking in a low voice, expressing the thought which came) 'this is not true...she is not in hell, she is alive in my heart."  yes, it is layered, personal layers, interpenetrating impersonal layers as well.  his words were expressing a inner feeling, something he could only know by 'feeling his heart'.   

two thoughts come to mind about 'meaning' vs. purpose.  likewise, i felt that the dream experience i shared was very meaningful, not only for me personally, but in an impersonal way as well, symbolically (dream language speak) of understanding that beneath the appearance (of objects as things, words) there is this other way of understanding, energetically.  the dream unfolded in three parts.  i don't know why i related only the last part.  i've noticed that dream messages seek to be understood, and if the meaning is not readily apparent to me, then it will come again with different symbols.  here are the other two in order as i was aware of them.

first part, i'm looking into the mouth of one of my patients (a new one, someone i haven't met before).  there are three teeth i notice that have old restorations (old amalgam fillings) that are black (oxidized) and breaking apart, creating spaces between the margin of the filling and the tooth,  and i'm thinking, "these need to be replaced, they are no longer functional, and will soon lead to major problems if not restored in the near future".  in the corner of my visual field, there is a man standing there (a friend of mine).  i get up from the chair where i'm seated beside my patient and do a very unusual thing (something i would never do in waking life).  i move to the doorway and give him a hug.  the lady in my chair is no stranger to him.

second part, i walk into the reception room of the dental office, and there is a man that looks faintly familiar seated in an overstuffed chair (a huge chair covered in leather).  there is a scabbard on his lap.  i am standing in front of him, and slowly he removes a winchester 30-30 lever action rifle, a hundred year centennial.  i've never seen one quite like it.  the wood is a light taupe color, and it's trimmed in silver (unlike most i've seen which have gold inlaid trim).  curiously, i lift it up, and on the underside of the stock, there is a carving of a woman.  i recognize the woman as sacagawea, the indian woman who, along with her husband, toussaint charbonneau, accompanied lewis and clark on their expedition west.  he replaces the gun in the scabbard, and i'm observing my thoughts, trying to make connections...  i ask him, "aren't you the same man who came before and showed me the sword of joan of arc?".... he smiles but doesn't answer.

then the last part (as mentioned above):  (in the dream i was looking into a mirror and my nose (knows, aka, gnosis) did, in fact, have very dark spots in a well organized pattern dispersed evenly across the entirety of my nose).

i feel, (and suspect, with a profound sense of accuracy) that this dream series was a response to the frustration i felt when trying to make sense of the article i had read the previous night.  when i read the article, i did wonder why does science refers to 'dark matter', as if it is some 'object' thing?,  instead of dark energy, which is meaningful to me as the archetypal influence of the divine, sacred, dark feminine. 

the carved image of sacagawea was meaningful to me as a representation of this, and i have long had an interest in understanding how she (and otter woman, another wife of charbonneau,  'fit' into the discovery west journey of lewis and clark.  of course i knew that she was a translator for the group, enabling them to communicate with the shoshone and other indian tribes along the way.  but deeper even than that, she was also the sustaining influence that kept the group alive.  with her knowledge of edible foodstuff, roots, berries, etc. the group was able to survive in conditions that would otherwise have been disastrous.  perhaps many of them would have died.  on two occasions when their boats capsized, it was sacawagea who swam into the water and was able to retrieve some of their possessions, including their written records of the journey...  in the end, there is little mention made of sacawagea's contribution to the success of the journey, except to say, she was a gentle woman who was a translator. 

the fact that her image was carved into the underside of the stock on the gun i think symbolized the constant feminine energy (the earth as our mother)  that supports and shapes all life, but relative to our awareness, remains, in large part, underneath (unconscious) the gun (symbol of what we think gives us power).  if we really understood the meaning of this, we would honor our inclusional space and care for it lovingly.... acknowledging that 'of ourselves, we do nothing'.  yet, just as history informs us that sacawagea's husband was a violent man, often abusing/beating her.... so there is that violence that we continue to heap upon our mother earth.

these are just some thoughts that came to mind, and i also wanted to share.  i would appreciate the thoughts of others as well.  i rarely think in terms of a 'personal' me any longer, and i think there may be others here that share this sense of unfolding life as an impersonal, yet beautiful, journey. 

yesterday a friend sent me the following message.  i was so touched by it, i'm going to put it here: 

 

                        HOPI ELDERS SPEAK

    You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
      Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour.
                    There are things to be considered:

                          Where are you living?
                            What are you doing?
                      What are your relationships?
                        Are you in right relation?
                          Where is your water?
                            Know your garden.
                      It is time to speak your Truth.
                          Create your community.
                          Be good to each other.
            And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

                        This could be a good time!

                  There is a river flowing now very fast.
    It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
                  They will try to hold on to the shore.
  They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.

                    Know the river has its destination.
  The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle
    of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

                See who is in there with you and celebrate.

        At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
                        Least of all, ourselves.
  For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a
                                  halt.

                    The time of the lone wolf is over.
                            Gather yourselves!

        Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.

  All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

                We are the ones we¹ve been waiting for.

                                The Elders
                              Oraibi, Arizona
                                Hopi Nation

thank you for thinking with me emile.  :>)

[emile]

hi carol,

lately, i don’t remember my dreams with such detail as you, ... but somehow, the same sort of notions ooze out of the spaces that include me and ‘become mine’, or maybe the ‘me’ oozes out into the spaces that include me to gather ideas like ripe berries in the forest, .... i’m not sure where ‘my’ ideas come from but ‘internal first cause’ has little credibility with me.

the hopi prophecies feel powerful and empowering.  the thought comes that one should learn hopi to ‘hear’ them.  english brings a  ‘literalness’ or ‘seriousness’ with it, recalling the ambiguity in the wizard of oz, between the stern voice coming out of nowhere and the mild man in the booth who was authoring it.    the hopi prophecies seem to need a smiling buddha delivering them, ... and perhaps they do in the hopi language, but there is a trace of william blake’s impression of the ‘tyrant God’ of christianity who cast his buddies down into the inferno forever, for daring to question his supremacy;

"Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed,
And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."

the idea of the banished feminine is pervasive, and why shouldn’t it be?  it seems silly that we pretend that space has no influence on us, and that we are an ‘independent’ organism whose behaviour springs forth from our inner purpose like a wind-up toy whose somatic awareness of inclusion (spatial-relationality) is so non-existent that he bumps into walls until such time as he learns not to!  in our culture, we have to invent our own theories for our awareness of inner-outer inclusion because the default teaching of our culture is the wind-up cyber-toy thing.  there are exceptions, like j.j. gibson’s theory of ‘affordance’ (direct awareness of relative possibility for action), though non-mainstream.    does the fleeing cockroach scan the wall for a hole to escape through as a wind-up computer-driven roach would?  or is the cockroach a flow-form that emerges into this swirling energy-field-flow included in the dynamics of space so that his action is not unlike the whorl in the bathtub that knows how to stick its tubular ‘finger’ down the drain?  if we find ourselves within a ‘bad smell’, we find a way out based on the affordance of fresher air like a spore directly activated by a moisture gradient, ... or if we are buried in a snow-drift and start wiggling around, we work ourselves out of it because our movement is relative to the snow and the snow which opens up most readily for us affords us the best path out.  so the affording or accommodating backpressure of space directly guides us without mental calculations using visual or tactile observations.

the man in the cart on his way to the guillotine and the sailor in the sailboat can, within their venue, exercise their free-will and do experiments to prove that the laws of physics hold true, ... but this freedom is trumped by the flow they are caught up in.  a ball of wind may descend on one sailor so that his boat can move relative to it, but not for another a mere 100 metres away, ... so that ‘thinking in terms of what things do’ is radically incomplete; i.e. within one’s personal space-frame as when the man in the guillotine decides to dance a jig to prove he is an independent object, ... and the sailor coils a rope neatly.  all the while they are doing these things, they are included in a space-flow that is taking them somewhere.  imagine the adventurous sailor of the 1400’s who had no charts, he was included in the winds and the world, in the womb of the feminine, but today’s commercial sailors reduce that inclusion by putting their behaviour in the service of chart in front of them with a straight line course from A to B.  now behaviour is self-authored from internal first cause, ... is it not?  now we can overpower the winds and the tides, so that our inclusion in a dynamical hostspace, the feminine, is no longer true, ... or is it?

if one looks around at the ‘cart’ one is in, a modern house equipped with many modern conveniences, ... it is not like having to build a shelter in the forest each night, or an igloo, as the weather you are included in is buffeting you.  the inner-outer relative dynamics are gone and your ‘cart’ is now a rigid protected cart almost like euclidian space, giving you freedom for one-side positivist living, to sing your song and dance your jig and to behave inside-outwardly, without having to let your behaviour be mutually shaped by the outside-inward accommodating backpressure of nature.  in the modern world, one feels as if one has been freed of the feminine to live ‘unnaturally’ in a one-sided positivist manner, as an independent assertive agent whose actions are driven strictly from his inner-purpose or ‘internal first cause’.

science gives us this view that removes our nature experienced sense of inclusion in the space-flow because science orients to visual perception.  try sitting becalmed in a sailboat.  it is not vision that informs us of our inclusion in a dynamical space-flow it is the cooling of our cheeks as we sense relative movement with the medium we are included in.  this is not the same as starting the outboard and having it drive us through the water, ... we are instead accepting our inclusion within the hostspace dynamic and putting our behaviour in the service of sustaining balance and harmony within it.  this is an inner-outer ‘felt experience’ kind of thing, radically unlike this self-determinism that comes with seeing ourselves as an independent assertive agent with internal first cause.    science does not inform us on such ‘inclusional experience’, a dance of the masculine and feminine, since it always looks at things from the point of view of a God-like excluded observer.

as the religious belief goes, ‘God did not have anyone tell him to create the world, he just did it of his own free will, ... and he made man in his image, giving to man this same free will, or ‘internal first cause’, the divine power to self-author his own behaviour’.

well, if we believe that, there’s  no room for the feminine, and dancing a jig in the cart on the way to the guillotine will become the primary reality since it represents exercising the divine powers of internal first cause that 'God has given us'.

but it gets curiouser and curiouser because when God looks at the world out in front of him, what he sees is ‘reality’ (it is all there is!) and he has blessed man, too, with this capacity to ‘see the reality out there in front of him’. 

there is no ‘feminine’, no invisible inclusional space-flow in this picture.  God is not included in anything, God is 100% positivist, ... where the buck starts (as we have seen, our culture of positivist doers doesn’t worry about where or whether the buck stops since without the feminine, there is no notion of inner-outer balance as a guide to our behaviour).

now, the god of the pantheists is both within and without so that this space-flow that man is included in has a divinity to it as well as the divine within which means that what man sees in front of him is not reality; i.e. his felt experience of inclusion in a space-flow he can feel but not see emulates a god that has an inner-outer immanence.  the supra-natural god  that can look out at the world entirely in front of him, the god that is included in nothing, does not need to contend with ‘inclusion’ therefore he has no need of feelings to sense inclusion and commit his full effort to positivist causal actions.  this drew from the gnostic (pantheist) poet william blake, the satirical positivist verse i cited above.

science perpetuates this idea of ‘the personal me’ or ‘the positivist me, gifted with independence and internal first cause of behaviour’ as does the non-gnostic notion of a supra-natural god having the power of internal first cause and the power of the excluded observer of reality whose totality is out in front of him that is ‘all there is’; i.e. God is not included in anything so he, and the excluded observer of science as well, have no need of ‘feelings that sense the experience of inner-outer inclusion’ in the invisible purely spatial-relational flow of the feminine.

‘dark matter’ is an epicycle-like fix to try, within the constraints of the notion of ‘existence of objects’, to explain how things get sucked around in spirals since a spiral represents SIMULTANEOUSLY COORDINATED behaviour which is beyond the scope of positivist theories based on independent objects.

hu nose, 'the shadow nose',  ... are not an appropriate question and answer if one believes we are included in a flow.  the ‘3-body problem’ suggests no-one knows but that our feeling-experience of inner-outer inclusion can, as with the sailor, take us safely to wherever we are going (spatial evolution continually updates all ‘wheres’) provided we are able to keep our inside-outward positiving in sustained balance and harmony with our outside-inward spatial accommodating.  our inner-outer participation in the evolutionary dynamic does not go away when we move into a modern house in a modern community in a modern nation, it simply goes ‘out of mind’ until the pissed off creatures in our shared hostspace come knocking angrily on our door, whose habitats have been put in turmoil by our nutrient-sucking and effluent-pumping pipeline systems that support a modern positivist living wherein the outside-inward accommodative backpressure of the feminine is nowhere to be felt but lurks out there somewhere as a dark and relentlessly building energy potential, as is immanent in those pissed-off creatures we refuse to negotiate with.  ... and why should we, ... reality is entirely out there in the defeminized world in front of us, is it not?

[Carol Massey]

  okay emile. 

i think the cogs have now engaged. thank you for your persistent kindness in not giving up on me to untie the knots, make the connections, build the bridges, tear down walls... necessary to realize what meaning there is in understanding life inclusionally.  i have experienced life in this way since childhood, although i passed through some unstable times (who of us doesn't if we humans all come to life in the same way!).  that's neither too much here nor there, really.  the important difference perhaps is that as a very young child, i knew to trust.  i knew (somehow?) there was a natural tendency toward balance in the universe, and recognizing those times of imbalance in my life, i discovered that when necessary i could flow, allow life to carry me.  now i recognize that i was always in the flow, whether i was conscious of it or not. 

so, i have known for many years that i participate in the mystery of life, inclusionally.  it has remained, until now, for me, something difficult to talk about because of a general bias/tendency among  those who are familiar with the 'words'  to accept the limited consensus definition that one who engages life in the manner of 'participation mystique' is experiencing (as in caught/trapped) in a pathological phenomonea that prevents the development of their individual persona. 

this is incomplete!  it is an unconscious framing assumption regarding psyche that has no meaning in reality.  i think it needs to be brought out of the closet, and rather than being an experience that fills one with dread, it would be beneficient if we understood it as a sacred passage that is natural and good.... it should be celebrated as a natural way to reconnect with life more fully, energetically.  i think indigenous people the world over know this... it is our white bread world that is ever so slow to give up notions that we are in control, and p.m. must imply that one is not in control of their lives....therefore not individuated from the collective unconscious.  this is simply error thinking. 

Participation mystique: (as defined by Marie Louise von Franz in DREAMS)A psychological condition in which various inanimate objects and people participate with each other in a mystical manner, are connected with each other beneath the surface of consciousness.

it is curious to me that m.l. vonfranz failed in her definiton to include all forms of energy... living things, plants, animals, etc., earth, sun, moon, planets, their moons, astroids, comets, stars, solar system, galaxy, archetypes, myths, etc, our loved ones whom we think have died, terrorists, enemies that we think we can wage war against and  kill, and they will be no more.... space, for god's sake. 

perhaps it was just an oversight on her part, or perhaps it's a fine example of the evolutionary nature of all things, and as my understanding interfaces with hers, something new arises.  assuming so, i feel it is only right and good to include these aspects, these missing elements, so with all things holey-inclusionally related, i can with confidence, say that (for me) participation mystique and inclusionality are dynamically related. 

[Carol Massey]

yesterday, i experienced a happening that i wanted to share here.  i walked into my office and a young woman who works there was standing in an area, a common space shared by all our co-workers, and she was crying.  i knew without being told that she was having a very bad day.... missing bobby,  (her lover, friend, soon to be husband who died in an accident about 6 months ago).  i was moved to hold her as closely as i could, and in doing so, she was able to relax her control, trusting that i would support her weight (both physically and the pent-up emotions that were weighing on her heart) and in that moment tears began to flow like a river, and while holding her, i could feel in my body a vibrating energy that was really the source of support, from my head to my toes, i had the feeling this 'aliveness', something mysterious.. was moving us together.  if magnetism has a meaning, it seemed in that moment that the energy in me was moving, responding to her felt emotions.  we were both held in a field of healing energy whose movement was toward balance and harmony.  we stood like that for five minutes or longer until the energy i was feeling disappeared, and my friend said, "i feel so much better now, more peaceful than i have for a long time". 

of course i didn't talk about the energy experience with her.  not everyone, i've discovered, can feel it... and it would perhaps not make sense to them to describe 'love', 'care', 'nurture', in energetic terms... it would, for lack of understanding, perhaps be labeled, 'participation mystique' and thought an odd way of interacting in the world. 

it was a healing experience.... one that i needed as well... as it came after i was feeling a lot of distress, disconnection from love, and anger.

       

[emile]

to me, this takes us back to  gordon shippey's original inquiry.   that is, the title 'patterns within thought' might better be replaced with 'thought within patterns'.;

[color=Blue] "Most believe that the idea of thought just being within the brain is RATIONAL IDEA,however this seem to when argued over come from not an fact outside ourselves but instaed from what the word aready set up or imples for us thought conjuers up instead a personal belief of the self and thought within.

We need to carfully look at our words and see if we are saying what we mean or are we being lead by words?


We seem to have been lead down this path before science discover the brain and it function,Now I am not saying I know where mind is but what I am saying is that our idea of mind is one sided and subjective itself hence at the moment does not fit in with the rest of idea within Science?

1.It wrong

2.There is no mind,but something else

3.It on the right track

I personally believe the second one

Gordon." [/color]

* * *

carol, your experience (in general, our experience) come to us in the form of something, a pattern, that changes the space we are included in, ... it surrounds us and we cannot excape from it.   it is like a tsunami, ... and thus our thoughts are secondary to the patterns we find ourselves bound up in.

to stay with our thoughts and to put them first (rather than letting ourselves respond to the unpredicted dynamics of the space we find ourselves in, as in the experience you shared) would be unnatural and not feel right.  the embrace is a response to what we FEEL is needed rather than what we think is needed.  it's inductive pull comes with a natural season to it, that is beyond the positivist logic of our thought.

 

[Carol Massey]

hi emile,

a natural season, yes.  a rhythm, a flow.  a holodynamical, mutually-defining activity of on-going creation.   

(in my experience) the 'form' which i perceive might be best described as a habit, or pattern, some kind of a memory, bound up with emotional energy...  powerful, yet without my conscious knowledge of it (a 'feeling' tsunami), eclipsing logical explanation.  i imagine something triggers it, and it is just there.  it is probably visual perception and language.  even if i do not recall something in my personal past, something in my personal present resonates with a past experience (could as easily be an impersonal, collective memory). 

i was consciously aware of  feeling 'disconnected' from life, no longer angry... but sad and lonely....the kind of lonely that one can feel in a crowd, and it is difficult to describe with words what that feels like, but to allow such a feeling to come brings with it a gift.  a significant and meaningful communication that cannot be contained in words which explain the world as 'cause and effect'.  this comes closest perhaps, "before you ask, the answer is given"...

soon after this experience, then unfolds the experience that i described above as 'being moved by a feeling to support my friend in her lonliness"..... 

this was not two discrete separate events (unconnected) when understand by our spatial relatedness.  we are all related in one consciousness.

[Carol Massey]

here is an expansion of energetic pattern, in the writings of eckhart tolle.  in my heart of hearts, i know eckhart tolle would not mind me sharing it here:

_____________________________________________________

The Power of Now,
A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by  Eckhart Tolle



Chapter Two  pp. 27-33
CONSCIOUSNESS: THE WAY OUT OF PAIN:
CREATE NO MORE PAIN IN THE PRESENT
Q. Nobody's life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn't it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?

A. The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind.

Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.

Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question "What time is it?" or "What's the date today?" - if anybody were there to ask it - would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. "What time?" they would ask. "Well, of course, it's now. The time is now. What else is there?"

Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.

If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and others, if you no longer want to add to the residue of past pain that still lives on in you, then don't create any more time, or at least no more than is necessary to deal with the practical aspects of your life. How to stop creating time? Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation. Always say "yes" to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say "yes" to life - and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.

Q. The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.

A. It is as it is. Observe how the mind labels it and how this labeling process, this continuous sitting in judgment, creates pain and unhappiness. By watching the mechanics of the mind, you step out of its resistance patterns, and you can then allow the present moment to be. This will give you a taste of the state of inner freedom from external conditions, the state of true inner peace. Then see what happens, and take action if necessary or possible.

Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.

n
PAST PAIN: DISSOLVING THE PAIN-BODY
Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark madecby someone close to you can activate it.

Some pain-bodies are obnoxious but relatively harmless, for example like a child who won't stop whining. Others are vicious and destructive monsters, true demons. Some are physically violent; many more are emotionally violent. Some will attack people around you or close to you, while others may attack you, their host. Thoughts and feelings you have about your life then become deeply negative and self-destructive. Illnesses and accidents are often created in this way. Some pain-bodies drive their hosts to suicide.

When you thought you knew a person and then you are suddenly confronted with this alien, nasty creature for the first time, you are in for quite a shock. However, it's more important to observe it in yourself than in someone else. Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form - it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state.

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.

Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you? A mere belief doesn't make it true. Do you want to experience pain for the rest of your life and keep saying that it is an illusion? Does that free you from the pain? What we are concerned with here is how you can realize this truth - that is, make it real in your own experience.