Natural Inclusion

Natural inclusion is a fundamental evolutionary process, evident from our actual life experience, which both inverts and radically expands beyond Darwin’s abstract concept of ‘natural selection’, which he called ‘the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life’.

Correspondingly, natural inclusion is the mutually inclusive, co-creative, receptive and responsive relationship between intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in the being, becoming and evolutionary diversification of all material bodies, including our own.

To put it another, deeper, way, all of us, from the atomic particles and cells within our human bodies to giant galaxies are made of Love, Where Love is understood both as ‘Receptive Yearning’ and ‘Responsive Passion’.

To understand the evolution of life as an expression of natural energy flow calls us to change the way in which we in modern culture have mostly been led to think about matter, energy, space and time as if they are separately definable and measurable aspects of reality. Most especially we need to change the way we have been led to think of space and boundaries as definable sources of separation between isolated objects, and begin to think of these instead as sources of natural continuity and dynamic distinction.

With the dynamic inclusion of space as non-local omnipresence within, throughout and beyond individual and collective identities, movement and change are understood in terms of processes of flow as a continuous reconfiguration of space – not as the travel of discrete, independent particles or waves through space. In other words, material bodies do not cut through space and occupy where it was.

With this recognition comes appreciation that all material bodies, including our own human bodies, are made of space and circulating energy in mutually inclusive, receptive-responsive relationship – a ‘dance’ of energy around and within the stillness of space. Think of how a tornado or hurricane forms as a whirl of energy around a receptive spatial centre, and you’ll get the basic idea. Both receptive stillness and responsive movement are required to co-create the dynamic form.

We can become aware of natural inclusion when we view life as an expression of natural energy flow in open space, not a competition in a closed box.

Natural Inclusionality

In summary:

Natural inclusionality is a fully comprehensive, phenomenological mode of philosophical enquiry, explication and relationship between self and neighbourhood based on awareness of natural inclusion.

Or, in more simple and personal terms – natural inclusionality is “the heartfelt awareness of space as being receptive to the energy flows that inform matter.”¹

Fuller description:

No sooner have we become aware of natural inclusion as the evolutionary process through which all material form comes into being and diversifies as a co-creation of space and energy in receptive responsive relationship, then we can begin to develop the new natural philosophy that I call ‘Natural Inclusionality’. This is a fully comprehensive, phenomenological mode of philosophical enquiry, explication and relationship between self and neighbourhood based on awareness of natural inclusion.

Notice here the distinction I am making between Natural Inclusionality as a ‘methodology’ or ‘philosophical approach’ and ‘natural inclusion’ as the fundamental natural process upon which this methodology is based.

By fully comprehensive, I am indicating a surpassing of partial or biased philosophical approaches that favour one view of reality or another instead of combining them. This partiality can lead to ignorance and deprecation of one view or another at the expense of appreciating and learning from the other.

Unhappily, such ignorance and mutual deprecation is all-too-evident in the battle of ideologies that characterizes so much of modern human culture. Those engaged in this battle have, through cultural reinforcement, mentally and/or emotionally excommunicated themselves from the reality of the natural world and cosmos as these actually are. In so doing, they diminish their own and others’ human understanding and flourishing. They will be prone to view natural inclusionality as an opponent, not a source of reconciliation and complementarity between their views and others within a polarized culture.

Now for the crucial point!!!

Over the millennia, ideological battles have commonly resulted from perceptions of reality that are either exclusively ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’, depending on whether the standpoint is within or outside what is being perceived.

By orienting both inwardly and outwardly towards and from a central point of dynamically embodied space, natural inclusionality brings both inner depth and outer breadth fluidly together in a fully comprehensive philosophy that truly appreciates the mutually inclusive, receptive-responsive relationship between space and energy in all material form.

I symbolized this some years ago in this painting – ‘How Compassion Fruits’.

Suddenly, with this kind of imagery, we can see the three dimensions of length, breadth and thickness in a new light, not as a rigid box imposed on space and time, but as a set of intangible receptive alignments – an axis and equatorial plane that calls responsive energy into dynamic circulatory formation around a receptive central point of space.

Suddenly too, all kinds of natural phenomena begin, quite literally, to fall into place and make natural sense!

For example, we can understand the behaviour of human bodies dancing responsively to music around their receptive centres of gravity. We can understand the inclusive love we feel in our hearts for all around us. We can understand the rings of Saturn, the solar system, galaxies and the universe itself as flat equatorial discs of responsive energy forming around a central hub of receptive space.

The following drawing by Roy Reynolds and my own painting, ‘Swallow Hole’ illustrate this natural flow-geometry: