Catching the Sun
Where would the sun be
With no where to catch its rays
And spin them into Life
Throbbing in receptive bodies
Responsive to warmth
Love is not divorced from Reason
As abstracted minds declare
Love is the Very Reason
We are Where
We are
A soft life lining
With gentle relief
Some hard core denial
Of what lies beyond resolution
Across a bridge that sighs
So much of what we fear as human beings — by way of pain, loss, failure and uncertainty — is not innate, but culturally imposed through the propagation of the myth that individual identity is in conflict with or subservient to group identity and/or some kind of supernatural power. This fear can be eased through recognition of our natural companionship as unique beings in varied receptive-responsive relationship with one another, other life forms and our environmental surroundings.
"There is, however, an obvious, more balanced and dynamic intermediary possibility, which makes sound natural sense and that many of us probably accept implicitly as the reality of our daily lives. We are both individually unique and depend on relationships with others to sustain ourselves. In fact it is because of our differences, and our associated complementary strengths and weaknesses, not in spite of them, that our need for relationship exists."
What does the word ‘space’ mean to you, and how does this affect the way you feel about your self and the natural world? Does what comes to your mind make your heart ‘Jump for Joy’, does it make your heart ‘sink’, or do you just feel ‘indifferent’?
In this short essay I want to say why there is every good reason for your heart to Jump for Joy! I also want to recognise how and why, for a great many of us, the very idea of space is liable to make our hearts sink or mean nothing at all to us. It all comes down to a question of perception.
"What results from the spectator view of reality is equivalent to a photographic snapshot — an instantaneous ‘freeze-frame’ within a restrictive perspective. Here all that is included in the foreground recedes to vanishing point at a distant horizon, and from that vanishing point all that is seen in the foreground is itself reduced to a vanishing point. We have a set of box-frames of progressively diminishing size receding into distance within the initial freeze-frame or ‘field of view’ apparent to the observer."
How many times have we heard it? A government wins an election based upon presenting a binary choice to an electorate, and then proceeds to claim that it has a mandate to do what it likes regardless of the dastardly opposition. It may even claim its influence to be ‘unifying’ and ‘healing’.
The reality is, however, that such a form of governance is actually a tyranny, a profound form of ARROGANCE and IGNORANCE, based upon the assumption that ‘whoever wins is right’ and whoever loses is ‘wrong’. There is no better recipe than this for guaranteeing the disaffection and despair of those depicted and humiliated as ‘losers’, no matter how few or many of them there are.
"True democracy therefore depends on developing a naturally non-binary philosophy. This is radically different from both the abstract dualistic philosophies upon which objective science has been founded, which treats matter and space as opposites, and from the monism that regards reality as all the same ‘unity’ or ‘oneness’. This is where the philosophy of what I have called natural inclusionality, comes in, founded on the experiential awareness of what I call natural inclusion."
Recognition has been increasing in recent years, and especially in recent months, that a great many of the problems we face in modern culture arise from a confrontational human relationship with the natural world. Calls to ‘connect’, ‘reconnect’ and ‘work with rather than against Nature’ are commonplace. But what do these calls really signify and what do they imply in practice? How could we have imagined humanity to be separate from Nature in the first place?
"Clearly there is a need for us to combine our own personal perceptions with those of others with different experience and abilities, if we are to gain as comprehensive an awareness of the reality in which we are situated as possible. We need both to hear and be heard, both individually and collectively."
The first 48 years of my life took me along a course that became devoted to the study of fungi and their relationships with other life forms and habitats, especially trees and woodlands. This study was made, however, within the context of a scientific and academic culture from which I felt increasingly alienated and that progressively nibbled away at my confidence until I reached a point when I couldn’t continue. I came to feel that either something was foundationally wrong with the culture or something was foundationally wrong with me.
"Quite simply, becoming aware of natural inclusion gave me back my calling and purpose in life, beyond mechanical utility. It validated my aesthetic appreciation of all natural material form as flow-form within a receptive continuum of space. It enabled me to dispense with any residual perception of objective self-isolation from my natural neighbours and neighbourhood. And it made sense of a great many scientific findings that make no sense in terms of definitive theory."
“The fact is that we are selfish,” she summarised the central problem succinctly. “But where does ‘Self’ begin and end?” I queried.
In Spring 2001 I convened a new, transdisciplinary final year undergraduate course at the University of Bath, entitled “Life, Environment & People”. My intention was to explore with the students how Biology, the science of life itself, might help us to understand and resolve the growing social, psychological and environmental problems facing humanity at the beginning of the new millennium.
"Self-identity is understood to be a natural dynamic inclusion of its neighbourhood, simultaneously both shaping and being shaped by its surroundings within continuously receptive space, NOT as an object isolated from its neighbours and neighbourhood by definitive boundaries and intervening space. This is hence a very different kind of understanding from that of abstract logic, which treats material ‘figure’ and immaterial ‘ground’ as mutually exclusive ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ instead of distinct but mutually inclusive presences."
