What is ‘Natural’ Science?

Something strange has become of Science. It has become estranged from the very Nature that it set out, in all honesty, to study, describe and explain as truthfully as it could. Far from being simply a form of open-ended, impartial enquiry and interpretation based on actual observations, experience, experimentation and sound reasoning, Science has become increasingly partial and partisan in its outlook and methodology.  The voices of many of its practitioners are most commonly raised in favour of hard-edged materialism, technocracy and predictability against what they perceive as the vagaries, fantasies and softness of romanticism, mysticism and theism. Science is being used and taught as a propaganda weapon in an ideological war between rationalistic objectivity and emotional subjectivity. Single-minded objective methodology and logic have been made sacrosanct – items of an unquestionable faith, which is used to assault and disregard the understandings of those whose ways of perceiving the world differ from its own. The language and logic of ideological conflict have been enshrined within the language and logic of Science, and scientific technologies themselves are used to provide weaponry to destroy and subjugate whoever or whatever is deemed an ‘enemy’. Science currently services the mental and technological machinery of relentless ‘War with Other’, not ‘Peace in Our Time’.

How did this estrangement of Science from its natural roots come about? Ironically, the seed for this estrangement was probably sown thousands of years ago in the birthplace of what was to become known as ‘western’ science. This was when the system of abstract logic upon which scientific methodology is founded was developed by Aristotle. This logic paradoxically abstracts material bodies from the immaterial space that material bodies naturally include and are included in. Consequently, it places matter in opposition to its spatial surroundings, i.e. in a mutually exclusive relationship of ‘to be or not to be’, ‘something’ or ‘nothing’.

Abstract logic is the product of a ‘third person’ view of our natural neighbourhood, which distances the observer from what is being observed – as if what is being observed is on the other side of an invisible barrier that prevents it from influencing or being influenced by the observer. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this view, which is provided especially via the lenses of our binocular eyesight. Indeed, this view is vital to our ability to distinguish between the positions, qualities and relative movements of our own bodies and those of other bodies in our natural neighbourhood. Without it we would literally be ‘lost souls’, unable to navigate our way in the world, recognising dangers and finding what we need to sustain our lives.

The problem with this distanced view arises only when it becomes exclusive of other modes of perception, the one and only permissible way to comprehend our natural situation. All is then rendered instantaneously into a set of independent, completely definable objects, isolated from one another by rigid, impermeable boundaries and gaps of space. When Science praxis becomes dependent on such exclusive perception, it becomes not natural, but abstract, estranged from the reality it claims to represent and explain.

Although this ‘objective’ view is often claimed to be ‘impartial’, it is nothing of the sort. It deprives the observer of the knowledge needed to understand what is observed, and if pursued single-mindedly can lead to profound distortion if not falsification of truth.

Imagine trying to understand someone just by looking at them. How can you truly explain how they have come to be as they are and how they behave, if you have no knowledge of what it must be like to be in their place? It’s not possible, is it? Why would you exclude from consideration your personal experience of how it feels to be alive, to suffer, to be hungry or thirsty, to love, to fear? How might you explain what motivates others if you discount what motivates yourself? Have you not noticed how diminished and impersonal others appear outwardly compared with the enormity of depth you experience inwardly, within your own body? What kinds of explanations of the form and dynamics of these others would you propose based solely on this diminished appearance? Chances are that you’d view these others as intrinsically inert mechanical objects in a clockwork Universe driven by external force in accordance with Newton’s Laws of Motion! And, you might well be affirmed in this view by the almost completely accurate predictions these Laws enable you to make providing that you confine your attention to those situations in which unpredictable change is minimal. But this would come at the cost of understanding the true character of natural bodies and how fundamentally unpredictable behaviour arises.

Now imagine allowing your personal experience of being alive in the natural world to combine with your distanced view of others that are currently distinct from each other and yourself. You begin to see others as you see yourself, and to see yourself as others see you. You cease to exclude yourself statically from what you see, and instead see yourself dynamically with others in what you see. Others have become your natural companions in common space, with whom you can enter into diverse, co-creative relationships, not isolated objects. Your bodily boundary is your dynamic communications interface with your natural neighbourhood, not your definitive limit. So too are their bodily boundaries. You have left behind a world of abstract exclusion of each from the other’s presence and entered into a world of natural inclusion of each in the other’s worlds. You have crossed the threshold of abstract science and are free to explore the open vistas of a truly natural science, in which matter cannot be dissociated from space, but is instead the product of a mutually inclusive relationship between space as a continuous, intangible presence everywhere and energy as a locally informative presence somewhere. With that move, the paradoxes and conflicts that have bedevilled abstract recede and a new and deepened understanding of our natural human neighbourhood beckons.

So, let’s now identify some of the qualities of this truly natural science.

1. It does not dissociate matter from space, or time from energy but instead includes all within the natural energy flow of ‘place-time’.

2. It recognises space as a continuous, and hence infinite, intangible presence everywhere

3. It recognises that natural boundaries are dynamic interfaces not static limits

Etc, etc

A new understanding of the evolutionary kinship of all life on Earth

Abstract:    Our human understanding of the origin and diversity of life on Earth has been dogged by an abstract way of thinking that is inconsistent with the occurrence of natural evolutionary processes as cumulative transformational flows. Not only has this resulted in profoundly paradoxical and tautological explanations of biological diversity, but it has also encouraged socially, psychologically and environmentally damaging misrepresentation of individual and group identities in both human and non-human populations and communities. Such misrepresentation is epitomized by the notion of the ‘Selfish Gene’ as a controlling agency, which dictates the form and behavior of living systems in order to ensure its own survival in competition with its natural neighborhood. It can be traced to a false dichotomy between material and immaterial presence, which goes back to ancient times, and may originate in the fear-based quest to isolate humanity from the vicissitudes of Nature in order to objectify and gain sovereignty over it. Understanding of natural inclusion removes this false dichotomy through recognizing that all tangible natural phenomena arise from the mutual inclusion of intangible space and energetic flux as receptive and informative presences. This understanding opens the way for human beings to live in much more sustainable, passionate and compassionate relationship with one another and our natural neighborhood than has hitherto been possible in modern civilizations.  

Key words:    Ecological attunement; energy flow; evolutionary creativity; flow-geometry; intangible presence; natural inclusion; natural neighbourhood; natural systems; place-time; sustainable evolution 

Entrance

Imagine yourself standing petrified on the concrete edge of a swimming pool, while being jostled by those next to you. Someone splashing about in the water shouts to you. ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely!’ But you’ve never experienced full immersion in water before and you’ve never been taught how to swim. How do you feel? Do you believe them, and take the plunge? Or do you err on the side of caution and stay put, digging in your heels? How can you appreciate the possibilities of what you are missing, and how you could escape from being hemmed in, when you have no knowledge, no actual experience of it?

Your understandable edginess in this situation is like what I encounter as an experienced ‘swimmer’, when trying to help people become aware of the limitless pool in which we can appreciate our self-identities as fluidly dynamic ‘natural inclusions’ of our neighbourhood, not stand-alone objects set apart from it. How can I entice you to leap through the mental barrier – the invisible wall – between the concrete surface where you feel secure, yet are immobilized and jostled upon, into the depth in which you can become alive and kicking, but could also drown if you or I are not careful enough?

Before I get any further, I need to point out that the limitless pool I have now just slipped into talking about is in a crucial way very different from but utterly vital to the very existence of a pool of water! By its very nature, it is uncontainable, an endless, frictionless source of freedom for movement that in itself is utterly still. It is an endless pool of space.

Movement

Now, let me say a bit more about myself. As far as I can recall, I have always felt a close kinship with Nature. I have recognised that what is all around me cannot be isolated from, and is just as vital to who and how I am as what is inside me. It is also continually changing. Correspondingly, you are all included in my world just as much as I am included in yours – I think Bob Dylan once said something like that. We live inescapably within each other’s natural neighbourhood.

Having long perceived myself and all other natural forms as inhabiting each other’s neighbourhood, I have been dismayed by the fact that most people nowadays don’t feel quite the same way. Instead, our cultural and educational institutions teach us, from a young age, to perceive ourselves and others as if we were hermetically sealed units, that is as isolated objects, both set apart from one another and boxed in by rigid boundaries and gaps of space, like the solid-looking coloured balls in this  abstract 3-dimensional diagram:-

and unlike the dynamically bounded flow-form I made below, which I made for my grandson in a beach, by moving sand around in space.

Over 40 years ago, I illustrated my feelings about the terrible damage caused by this alienating perception in a painting called ‘Arid Confrontation’.

In order to feel secure, we mentally sever ourselves from each other and the creative wildness of the natural world by setting in place an imaginary barricade – what I call ‘the space barrier’ – that enforces profound social and psychological conflict and environmental destruction. Instead of loving our neighbourhood as a source of sustenance for our self-identity to come into being and be included within, like my sand-whirl, we make an enemy of whatever we perceive and label to be on the ‘other’ side of a rigidly defined boundary. That is, we mentally exclude from ‘me’ or ‘us’ whatever we define to be ‘outside’ of ‘me’ or ‘us’, and then seek to control or eliminate it in acts of exploitation and war.

Recall Hamlet’s famous soliloquy and where it led him: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, OR, to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them’.

Nowhere has this abstract sense of severance of ‘each from the other’ by rigid boundaries been more prevalent than in modern science. It is embedded in Darwin’s view of ‘natural selection’ as ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’, and is associated with the idea that evolutionary success is dependent on the competitive elimination of others. Even Albert Einstein declared that ‘the environment is everything that isn’t me’. His paradoxical isolation of ‘self’ from ‘other’ is evident in his following statement concerning what he called ‘the problem of space’:-

“When a smaller box s is situated, relatively at rest, inside the hollow space of a larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S, and the same ‘space’, which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and to assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other.”

How, you might ask, can an unbounded box of space be distinguished from its environment, yet alone move around in and relative to it?

If you stop to think carefully about why we impose these definitive limits on ourselves and Nature, it becomes clear that to do so simply cannot make sense. Ask yourself what kind of a boundary could actually separate the space within you from the space around you without itself including space? That’s right: it would have to have no thickness and hence be nowhere! The intangible, frictionless, space within you and without you is continuous throughout you! As I move around, space is slipping through me – I am not moving space aside from me. Space is an intangible presence. My body, like all bodies, is a tangible, permeable and variably cohesive presence that includes and is included in space.

When I breathe in, my body expands as my outside simultaneously contracts and breathes out into me. The situation is reversed when I breathe out. There is no delay between what happens inwardly and what happens outwardly. My bodily boundary distinguishes my inner space from my outer space and mediates their reciprocal correspondence. It does not isolate them. 

Space gives material form somewhere to exist and move around in – it is not a material in itself. So what the Devil have we been doing, for millennia, by not only pretending that zero-thickness boundaries exist, but actually incorporating this pretence into our systems of abstract logic, conventional mathematics, objectivist science, hierarchical governance and elitist education? Here, according to C.S. Lewis is what the Devil himself liked about it:

“The Whole Philosophy of Hell…rests on a recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specifically, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours…’To be’ means to be in competition”. (C.S. Lewis “The Screwtape Letters”)

So, how can we liberate ourselves from this hellish mental isolation of one self from another self by definitive boundaries and gaps of space?

Quite simply, I think we can liberate ourselves by recognising how natural space and boundaries actually are and must be as distinct but mutually inclusive presences. We can do this by appreciating:

•Natural space as a presence that is not a substance but makes the existence of substance possible

i.e limitless, motionless, frictionless and hence receptive and infinite omnipresence everywhere that provides possibility and freedom for movement

•Energy as continuous motion or flux

i.e. a presence that is packaged into local substance as ‘matter’, and dispersed as ‘radiation’ (known as ‘light’, when visible)

When we think about it, everything is necessarily 100 % space PLUS energy, not part space and part energy. That’s how Nature is, including human nature.

Now I think a vital principle of life and love as mutually inclusive presences begins to emerge.

My painting, ‘Holding Openness’, below, expresses how all natural form is the co-creation of continuously mobile, informative presence (energetic flux) and continuous immobile receptive presence (space). Light cannot Live without Darkness (i.e. space), Darkness is Void without light. Each necessarily includes and is included in the other.

This perception differs radically from the common portrayal of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ as opposites on either side of a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Just think how far-reaching the implications of a shift to this different perception would be! It would free us from divisive belief in a struggle for existence (‘to be’) against non-existence (‘not to be’), to an acceptance of living bodily boundaries continuously circulating and reconfiguring within a limitless sea of receptivity, not holding their own against a sea of troubles.

Instead of thinking of ‘Number One’ as ‘One alone’ or ‘I Alone’, or ‘Me Alone’, or ‘Us Alone’ or ‘You Alone’ we come to recognise that

    Where Space is Continuous and Boundaries are Dynamic
    One is never an independent object

As William Wordsworth once declared:

‘In nature, everything is distinct, yet nothing is defined into absolute, independent singleness’.

And so it is that when all is in the flowing mutuality of energy and space, any kind of mathematics or science that either excludes space from matter as a dimensionless point of mass, or conflates space with matter as One and the same self-contained ‘Whole’, entire of it self – cannot make natural sense. Truly natural numbers and geometric figures both include and are included in space: they are never ‘alone’ or ‘All One’.

Now I’d like to introduce some observations that helped to reveal this radically different perception of individual and collective identity to me, through showing how fungi are capable of sustainable growth in circumstances where their supplies of energy vary.

The ‘mushrooms and toadstools’, like the ‘magpie ink cap’, below, which our superficial view of things might deceive us into thinking is ‘the whole fungus’ is, in reality, no more ‘all there is’ to a fungus than an apple is all of an apple tree!

As with a ‘star’ of film or stage, behind the scenes of that outward appearance is an extraordinary, hidden production team that does all the hard work of gathering in the energy required to make it possible. This is what is known as the ‘mycelium’ of the fungus, a collective organisation of microscopic, branching tubes called ‘hyphae’, which grow from their tips in a radiating pattern. Here is a view of the pattern formed when the mycelium of the magpie ink cap is cultured in an array of alternating, energy-rich and energy-scarce localities:-

What we are witnessing here is the ability of a dynamic living organization to change its pattern of growth in direct response to its neighbourhood. In conditions of abundance it multiplies; in conditions of scarcity it conserves and redistributes what it already has in the process of preparing and exploring for more to come its way. Unlike our current, divisive social and economic systems that are based on abstract perceptions of space and boundaries, it does not borrow what it hasn’t got from a future that hasn’t come in order to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals!

Isn’t there a very simple lesson in this for human organizations? That is:

In Naturally Sustainable Organizations, Life is a gift of energy to be received, sustained and passed on in natural relay

If we look a little closer, at the microscopic, branching hyphal tubes themselves, we can see how their ability literally to ‘club together’ and ‘pool resources’ in order to produce a ‘mushroom’ depends on the capacity of their dynamic boundaries to grow towards one another, make contact and then dissolve to open up internal spatial communication channels. Flow within and between these channels is then regulated by valve-like partitions, known as septa, with central holes that can be blocked or unblocked. As illustrated in the following time-lapse sequence, shown clockwise from top left:-

But there is yet another ability that is vital to the ability of the mycelium sustainably to locate, gather in, conserve and redistribute sources of energy. This is their ability to degenerate and die in the process of ‘passing on’ the gift of life to others, as illustrated in the next time lapse sequence of the mycelium of the sulphur tuft fungus growing out through the ‘desert’ of intervening soil between one source of nutrients (a small block of wood, in this case) to another small block of wood:-

The vitality of death and decay to the opening up of new possibilities for life is illustrated in the painting below of a dying elm tree and the multitude of life forms that inhabit and supersede it.

Without death, life as a manifestation of natural energy flow stalls. In Nature, death feeds life, not the other way round. And where energy is the currency of life, the abstract economic notion of growth in excess of available resources by borrowing from the future is unsustainable.

This brings me to consider how evolutionary diversification arises through a dynamic transformational process of natural inclusion of each in the other, NOT, as envisaged by Darwinian selection theory, through the competitive elimination of one by another falsely perceived as an opponent of self:

I call the painting below, ‘Future Present’, and it is indeed intended to convey a ‘Perception of the Future’ in which the ‘Present’ is not a definitive line or ‘cut’, drawn between Past and Future, but a continual ‘bringing of past into the coming of future in the process of natural energy flow.

The evolutionary diversification of life is here perceived as a fluid dynamic process of cumulative energetic transformation of each in others’ co-creative influence, over vastly differing scales from microcosm to macrocosm. It cannot be prescribed or contained in a rigidly defined box of genetic information alone, frozen in discontinuous time and space.

From Hierarchy to Lowerarchy: Pyramids, Pits and The Loss and Recovery of Gorm (Attentive Receptivity)

The ancient idea of a Great Chain of Being or Hierarchy, reaching down via the utter perfection of God as a Judgmental Figure to the dominion of Superior Man over Inferior Man over Inferior Nature still holds a powerful sway over our human attitudes towards one another and our natural neighbourhood. It even persists in the Darwinian notion of ‘selection’ as the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life: an external judgmental agency views Nature as a set of discrete objects and decides which ones are good or not good enough to survive.  Almighty Authority sits atop of a pyramid of numbers and views the pitiful masses beneath in a pitiless way that takes no account of what it is actually like to live amongst them, within their natural neighbourhood.

My following poem describes this situation:

The Humility of the Valley

Life doesn’t strive

To secure its foundation

Upon the rocky serrations of the High-minded

Where Men build castles in the air

To furnish that false sense of superiority

Which comes from the pretence

Of overlooking all around

To the edge of infinity

Life thrives

In the seclusion of the valleys

Where dampness accumulates

In the earthy humidity

Of humility

Warmly tucked in

To the bed of sea and land

Rich with variety

Exuding

Intruding

Out and into the cosiness

Of each lovingly enveloped

In the other’s influence

Wisdom cannot be found

On peaks of adaptive fitness

Running with Red Queens

But only in that radiant depth

That reaches everywhere

Through the heart of somewhere

Alan Rayner, 2009

Symbolically, the story of the New Testament is that of an Authority Figure come down to Earth as a Lover amidst the flow of life instead of an independent and manipulative arbiter. In this new-found situation, a radical shift in attitude takes place, from one of judgemental condescension to one of tender care for the needs of self and others in the natural companionship of their natural neighbourhood, not a singular figure alone. Hierarchy of increasing independent perfection is subsumed by ‘lowerarchy’ of mutual needfulness. Self becomes receptive and attentive to what is needed to sustain life, by way of attuning with the availability and flow of sources of energy. Such attentive receptivity is also known as ‘Gorm’, which is associated with lively passion, compassion and responsiveness, the lack of which, ‘Gormlessness’, is associated with insolence, compliance, inconsideration and talking non-sense! The quest for hierarchical power leads not only to corruption but to gormlessness – not a desirable state of affairs by which to be governed, but which continues to dominate the aspirations and expirations of human leaders and followers alike!

To return to the abstract, definitive logic of Darwinian selection, what is ultimately envisaged is an incoherent universe of virgin territory (void) populated instantaneously by a random set of pre-existing independent occurrences perceived numerically and geometrically as atomistic whole objects, i.e. dimensionless ‘point masses’, devoid of space. For this original and ultimate ‘chaos’ to be called into motion and coherent order requires the intervention of external ‘Force’, which imposes the ‘Laws of Nature’ that, Sherlock Holmes-like, determine what is and is not permissible and eliminate the latter.  Notice here the tautological conundrum that what is being eliminated is what is impossible in the first place! This gives rise to the ‘Just So’ stories of Darwinan Selection Theory, which explain away all the attributes of living creatures as the product of competitive adaptation to a pre-existing set of environmental specifications (a so-called ‘niche’ or ‘box of limited space’). Tales of selfish genes as randomly generated tyrannical units of selection, monkeys randomly generating the works of Shakespeare on a typewriter given infinite time, blind watchmakers assembling bits and pieces into coherent order and the like are works of objectivistic science fiction, founded in fallacy. An insult to our natural intelligence, couched in digital machine code of one or none. It is these damaging impossibilities that really need to be eliminated from our understanding of human and natural evolution, not the rich variety of possibilities that arise through natural companionship.

So how, then, can an appreciative understanding and awareness of natural companionship help to transform the way we have become prone to think about the evolution of natural diversity and our human place in it? How can we live co-creatively, sustainably and compassionately without feeling forced to compete or co-operate with or against one another? How can we recognise the enormous variety of life-sustaining relationships that can develop between different neighbouring identities besides unity or division?

Essentially I think this understanding becomes possible as soon as we STOP thinking of ourselves and others as autonomous, free-willed objects subjected to external administration and judgement, and START thinking of ourselves and others as dynamic inhabitants and expressions of our natural neighbourhood, living within each other’s mutual influence. We may then understand evolution as a cumulative, fluid process of mutual transformation within each other’s company, not a selective sorting mechanism that judges goodness of fit to a preconceived ideal.

In other words, we need to move on from viewing evolution in terms of abstract selection by an extrinsic arbiter, to understanding evolution as an intrinsic process of natural inclusion, i.e. the fluid-dynamic, co-creative transformation of all through all in receptive spatial neighbourhood. Underlying this move is a simple but fundamental shift in the way we perceive all natural, tangible phenomena, including ourselves, as local expressions of a mutually inclusive relationship between energy and space as distinctive informative and receptive presences. Once we make that move and embrace it in our minds, hearts and guts, the restrictive way of life that has been blighting our humanity for millennia radically transforms into one that makes a lot more natural sense. Instead of denigrating our natural companions as inferior, we recognise their vital place in the natural scheme of life, where it truly does take all kinds to co-create a viable, sustainable world.

As I once expressed it in the following poem and painting:-

The Hole in the Mole

I AM the hole

That lives in a mole

That induces the mole

To dig the hole

That moves the mole

Through the earth

That forms a hill

That becomes a mountain

That reaches to sky

That pools in stars

And brings the rain

That the mountain collects

Into streams and rivers

That moisten the earth

That grows the grass

That freshens the air

That condenses to rain

That carries the water

That brings the mole

To Life

And as this appeal for the conservation of hedgehogs calls to us:-

Respite

Finally, I want to offer some thought about how this new, natural perception of space and boundaries could allay our deeply entrenched fear of ‘what’s on the other side’ through appreciating ‘uncertainty’ as ‘the imagination of Nature’ expressed in natural flow-form as an energetic inclusion of space.

Here are two quotes from famous naturalistic poets:

A summary for sceptics

1. Sadly, very few people can readily understand and appreciate natural inclusion, due to the prevalence of an abstract, definitive way of thinking and using language, which isolates subjects and objects from one another as independent entities

 

2. Recognizing the ecological reality that one thing cannot actually be isolated from anything else is a good place from which to begin to overcome this difficulty.

 

3. Next comes awareness of why, fundamentally, this ecological reality exists and how it is gravely and damagingly misrepresented by all kinds of thinking based on definitive logic, which treats material and immaterial presence either as mutually exclusive or as one and the same.

 

4. This ecological reality fundamentally exists because space as an intangible, receptive omnipresence and energy as locally informative presence are distinct but mutually inclusive in all natural phenomena. Every natural body is 100 % space plus continuously circulating energy.

 

5. With this awareness comes a sensitive and sensible way of understanding our natural neighbourhood and human place within it, which is consistent with our actual experience and makes consistent, non-paradoxical sense.

 

6. We recognise that we and all other distinguishable forms are dynamic inhabitants and expressions of nature, not isolated subjects and objects.

Why We Need a ‘Natural Neighbourhood Watch’

‘Finding life at home in the cracks between paving slabs’

Since 1978, I have been at home in the village of Bathford. I had come to the area in order to take up a lecturing position in the Biology Department at the University of Bath. Here, until my early retirement in summer 2011, I gradually became aware of a growing gap between what people are being taught in school, at lectures, in books and TV programmes about the diversity of life – and my actual direct experience of it as an enthusiastic naturalist. I became aware also of a gap between the popularity of ‘Nature’ programmes on TV, and people’s awareness and interest in what they could find – with a little knowledge of how to look, where to look and what to look for – within easy reach of their front or back doorstep. If I tried to talk about this – or even, horror of horrors – offered to show people what they were missing while frantically busying themselves with the pressures of modern life, I would be met with blank stares, or worse. ‘That’s a real conversation stopper!’ I remember someone saying to me. ‘What practical use is that?’ was another common refrain. When I recently became President of Bath Natural History Society, I wanted us to reach out to local communities within and around Bath and encourage people to take an interest in their natural neighbourhood and not to feel shy about it. But the idea that ‘natural history’ is something for aloof experts poring over dusty relics in museums, not anyone and everyone, was an immediate barrier.

A recent report on ‘The State of Nature’ has described catastrophic declines in some of our most familiar British Wildlife. ‘How can this be?’ ‘What can we do?’ the cries go up.  If we are to address these questions adequately, I think we have to recognise the deep-rooted prejudices that have blighted our human relationship with our natural neighbourhood for hundreds if not thousands of years, and are now coming to a head in two distinct but related crises. First, I recognise a ‘crisis of knowledge’, which arises from a decreasing awareness amongst many people of the value and diversity of our natural neighbourhood. Basically, if we don’t know about it, how can we care about it? Second, I recognise a ‘crisis of self-identity’ due to the increasing prevalence of a way of thinking that alienates people from each other and their natural neighbourhood. We are led to believe that life is a struggle for existence of ‘us against them or that’. Our governmental and educational institutions are currently and relentlessly exacerbating both these crises, by encouraging us in all sorts of ways to believe that we are ‘independent’ and that ‘competition’ – the intentional opposition to and defeat of what is not ‘me’ or ‘us’, is somehow ‘good for us’. As I have explained in my recent book, ‘NaturesScope’ and elsewhere (e.g. see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Natural_Inclusion, http://www.inclusionality.org), the wonderful variety in natural wildlife communities actually tells us a very different story, if we think carefully about it.

I think the remedy for these deep crises is actually to be found in drawing inspiration from diverse natural wildlife communities as a way to deepen our own sense of human community and self-identity as an inclusion of, not set apart from our natural neighbourhood. I think it would be rather wonderful to develop as much pride in the richness of our natural neighbourhood as we might in the products of our civilization. Finding the answers begins at home. In our own small way, Bath Natural History Society is hoping to help local communities within and around Bath discover the wildlife on their doorstep. We’d love you to join with us (see www.bathnats.org.uk). You never know. What begins locally, may spread nationally…and even globally. 

Reference

Rayner, A.D.M. (2011). NaturesScope: unlocking our natural empathy and creativity – an inspiring new way of relating to our natural origins and one another through natural inclusion. O Books

First published in ‘The Local Look’, July 2013

Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries

– A Call For Social and Political Renovation

**Notice how all political campaigns are still described popularly as ‘battles’ and culminate in undemocratic ‘rule by majority’.

**Notice how campaigns are only considered to be fought positively or negatively?

Our documented human history highlights the philosophical, psychological and political battle that has been fought for millennia between complementary aspects of human nature that should never be split apart.

Is there not a need to transform this battleground, which destroys our evolutionary potential, into a co-creative playground that enables our true potential to be fulfilled?

How can we do this? How can we reconcile the obvious variability (and varying ability) of human beings with the democratic, social and compassionate call to treat all equally (and indeed devote more care to those less able to care for themselves), especially  in the context of an unsustainable eliminative/competitive Darwinian evolutionary model that selects ‘favoured races’ and discards the ‘not good enough rest’?

How can we reconcile ‘individualistic’ and ‘collectivistic’ principles without discounting one or other of them?

Those battles that have blighted human understanding and led to needless suffering are between abstract ways of thinking about and perceiving ourselves and our surroundings as separate entities. We are often most exposed to these ways of thinking and perceiving during our upbringing.

We are brought up by people who have had their own subtle and acute experiences of extremism, growing up within communities that have argued about the respective merits and repugnance of opposing views.

How many of us have been caught psychologically in the cross-fire between opposing perceptions of a kind that calls us to take arms and side with one or the other?

How many of us know how it feels to be swayed both ways, and how this in turn awakens a yearning to find a way to resolve differences without taking sides.

Is it helpful to disregard the truth of what someone says purely because it seems to conflict in some way with your values or beliefs?

Is there not a way of recognising and valuing both individual uniqueness and social cohesion in evolutionarily sustainable and creative communities?

Can a deep awareness of Nature show us how to bring and keep ourselves together in a way that no abstract way of thinking/perceiving does or can?

Can we gain this awareness by referring back to the first principles of how we regard ourselves and others individually or collectively either as ‘independent performing objects’/’wholes’ (the basis of objective/abstract rationality and romanticism) or as ‘dynamic inclusions and expressions of our natural neighbourhood’?

Yes, we can!

Patterns emerge and change. Current Flows. To what degree can we truly be free?

Encyclement: A Natural Inclusional Cosmology of Life and Love

Throughout our history, we human beings have sought knowledge not only of our own past and future but also that of the natural world and cosmos we inhabit. What kind of compulsion is it that induces us to make this quest, while other life forms appear to sustain themselves through renewable cycles of living, birthing and dying simply by doing what comes naturally to them? Whatever it is, it seems to be underlain by a feeling that without such knowledge, we feel lost and out of control in an unfathomable and complex labyrinth within which our lives have become inescapably entrapped, with the only way out and back in being through an entrance/exit marked ‘Birth/Death’. This feeling of uncertainty may make us scared silly of some kind of soul-devouring Minotaur that awaits us deep within the labyrinth or a judgmental figure at its entrance/exit who may or may not let us pass. ‘Knowledge is Power’, we may then tell our selves, and with it we can determine our destiny through our own free will, rather than have it decided by some ‘external judge’ or ‘pit-dwelling devourer’ beyond our influence: we can gain dominion over Nature by discovering its hidden rules and turning them to our advantage by knowing the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We can play-act knowing the ‘Mind of God’. Alternatively, or in addition, we may journey in the humble hope of finding some ultimate source of truth, goodness, love and illumination in the depths or beyond the entrance/exit gate, which will care for us ‘unconditionally’ – but, paradoxically, only if we have ‘faith’ in it and request forgiveness for our departures from its code of practice!

Perhaps inevitably, this quest has brought our interest in knowing ‘the truth’ into tension with our desire to live fulfilling and meaningful lives and our fear of what will become of us and those we love in an uncertain and ultimately unknowable future beyond our immediate sensory perceptions. Given this tension, how can our enquiry into the nature of our being and becoming ever be truly impartial, i.e. comprehensive and unbiased? Is it possible to avoid being influenced by what we would dearly like or not like to know?

The tension between seeking to know ‘truth’ and wishing to know that ‘all will be as we most desire’, not as we most fear, has evolved into the ideological conflicts between different belief systems that have raged for millennia and continue to do so. These conflicts are made all the more destructive through the invention of increasingly potent weaponry. If they are to be resolved peacefully, there is a clear need to develop a view of nature and ourselves that most if not all of us can readily accept is consistent with actual experience and that makes consistent sense, not paradox.

This is a where a truly impartial, natural scientific approach could be of great and lasting benefit to humankind. Unfortunately the objectivist methodology of most modern science is anything but impartial because it deliberately excludes consideration of anything other than physically tangible and hence quantitatively definable (i.e. ‘measurable’) natural presence. This unnatural exclusion is rooted in the abstract, definitive logic, which holds that the only alternative to contradiction (“it is impossible for the same object to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same object and in the same respect”) is unity (“all objects will be one”). By imposing an absolute discontinuity between material and immaterial presence, such logic – which is embedded in the foundations of classical and modern mathematics – is not only paradoxical and inconsistent with actual experience, but also brings the objectivist science built on its foundation into collision with any kind of non-materialistic religious or spiritual belief. Its underpinning belief in and desire for the ultimate definability and predictability of nature – the abstract, hard-lined rules of ‘the labyrinth’ – merely serves to reinforce conflict, not to bring the much needed relief that could be gained from a more comprehensive and widely acceptable approach. In its quest for certainty, one way or the other it impales us on the Minotaur’s horns of dilemma instead of enabling us to leap clean between their opposing menace. 

I think that a more natural and comprehensive scientific approach than that espoused by objective abstraction is possible. I have called this approach ‘natural inclusionality’. It arises from impartially addressing the simple question: ‘what, most fundamentally, makes any natural form distinguishable from its surroundings?’ (see video illustration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI). It becomes apparent that the only way of answering this question is to acknowledge the occurrence of at least two kinds of natural presence: (1) a receptive context or non-resistive medium, which provides freedom for local movement and/or expression; (2) local formative content, which informs or configures that context. The former is necessarily spacious, the latter necessarily cohesive. Moreover, for form to be and become distinguishable, each of these presences must naturally include the other. Spacious presence alone would be formless void, and formative presence alone would have no shape or size. They are necessarily distinct, but mutually inclusive presences. They can neither be abstracted from one another as independent entities, nor be homogenized into ‘Oneness’. The only way in which this necessity can be fulfilled is for one of these presences, natural space, ultimately to be everywhere, continuous, intangible (i.e. frictionless/non-resistive) and immobile, and for the other ultimately to be somewhere, distinctive, tangible and continually in motion. Try whirring your hand around in front of your face until it appears as a blur, and you may get a feel for how all distinguishable form will ultimately appear this way when viewed sufficiently closely (i.e. at sufficient magnification) and for sufficient duration - if the whirring stops even for a moment, so too does 'time', and the mutual inclusiveness of each in the other breaks down irretrievably. Natural space and figural boundaries are hence, respectively, continuous and dynamically continuous energetic interfacings and distinctions between the insides and outsides of all natural forms as flow-forms.

What emerges from natural inclusionality is a view of natural geometry as intrinsically dynamic – an ‘Encyclement’ or 'Becoming Hole' of vortical/toroidal flow, not a ‘Pre-defined Whole’ of permanently crystalline Form (see http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/2341?tab=article&title=becoming-hole; http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/1798?tab=article&title=place-time-the-flow-geometry-of-space). By its very nature, such flow-geometry is impossible to express adequately in definitive linguistic or mathematical terms. The 'hole point' of natural inclusionality is that in a dynamic reality of natural energy flow ('place-time'), there are no such things as complete 'wholes' and 'parts' and neither space nor time can be cut into discrete segments. All is in a flux of variable viscosity – continual circulation – and can be seen to be so if examined sufficiently closely and for sufficient duration. Natural ‘Time’ is implicit within this flux, not an abstract, one-size fits all, independent measure set apart from it in order to assess its ‘speed’. In terms of life experience a mouse may live as long as a Galapagos tortoise.

 

The fundamental physicality of this flow-geometry becomes possible to infer (i.e. ‘imaginatively bring in to awareness’, not rationalistically deduce or induce respectively from general rule to specific instance or vice versa) no sooner than one has acknowledged the mutual inclusion of continuous receptive space and continuously mobile energy in the process of rendering natural bodily form distinguishable from yet not isolated from its surroundings. There is no metaphysics (super-naturalism) here. There is only the inference of how things must be and become if space and energy/form are to be mutually inclusive. For they must be and become this way if the cosmos is not to collapse onto the motionless, timeless, formless condition of nowhere and nothingness of the 'singularity' (dimensionless point mass) assumed by abstract 'big bang cosmology' and embedded in the abstract foundations of classical and modern mathematics.

 

So, how can an appreciation of this natural inclusional flow-geometry help us to deal with the potent cocktail of desire and fear, which leads us to seek the certainty of a hard-lined existence and yearn respectively either for the defeat or the love and forgiveness of some fantastic monstrous or adorable Figure beyond our reach? Well, to begin with, it enables us to review afresh some ancient ideas regarding the fundamental nature of life, love and their dynamic relationship. 'Eros' corresponds with 'radiant energy' (~light/electromagnetic radiation), ‘Agape’ with receptive space in the heart of bodily form and continuous with receptive space everywhere, and ‘Philia’ with 'bodily energy', which circulates around local centres of Agape (~gravity) to give rise to bodily flow-form. None of these can express their reciprocal co-creative potential in the absence of the other

 

The form of a vortex or spiral galaxy visualizes the erotic radial flow of energy towards and the philial circumferential flow around local centres of agape (eye of the storms, 'black holes') rather beautifully. So, there we have it - natural inclusional cosmology in a dynamic nutshell, with nothing supernatural and everything extra-ordinary about it. With this cosmology in mind, we are free to wander open-heartedly in the ultimately unpredictable wildness of natural flow-geometry, released from hard-lined artifice. We can stop play-acting and start playing, as fully immersed participants in the life and love of our natural neighbourhood. But as we do so, it is important not to look back in longing for the false sense of freedom and security offered by pre-definition – for, if we do so, the Medusa of abstract rationality will be sure to reinforce her stony grip and impale us on one or other of the Minotaur’s horns of dilemma.

Acknowledgement

I would especially like to thank Rev. Roy Reynolds for his support and insight, which contributed to my preparation of this essay, including his exploration of the meanings of Eros, Agape and Philia in relation to natural inclusional awareness, which I have developed further.

Being Someone Other

Being someone other

Than who you think I am

Doesn’t come easily

It wrenches me apart

Into worlds divided

Between compliance and rebellion

With your expectations

Complete with disregard

For what lives deep within

Each living body

Each loving heart

Yearning to be known

As what comes naturally

Without requiring to be called

But calling nonetheless

For your attendance

To what you need to know

If you’re to live and love

The wrenching of analytical aside from intuitive does seem to be a recurrent feature of my life experience, which has found its way into much of my writing and artwork. It was present in the very different personalities of my father (~analytical) and mother (~intuitive), which sometimes came into violent collision, with me caught in their cross-fire. It was present in the schism between colonist and colonized, which I witnessed during my early childhood in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. It was present in my schooling, where I came under pressure to follow the scientific orientation of my father, even though I struggled to understand and felt very uncomfortable with ‘hard-line’ scientific thought and method. It was present throughout my scientific career, where I struggled to comply with what I felt were expectations of me during an era when ‘biology’ was progressively reduced from the study of organic life in all its beauty and diversity to the study of genetic bar-codes. I certainly experienced and experience the feeling of ‘Being Someone Other’ than people expect me to be, and all the anxiety that accompanies that condition. In 1999, that experience led to ‘breakdown and breakout’, when I quit my work as a mycological research scientist – a wrenching experience that I have never recovered from and leaves me with the feeling of utter failure in that role (a feeling reinforced by the disregard of my peers). From then on I redirected my scientific efforts into seeking the reconciliation between analytical and intuitive that my personal psychological struggles had been seeking since childhood. I began to follow – or at least take much more dearly to heart – the path of my mother. And that too, has proved to be a rough and demoralizing ride – at least in terms of gaining appreciation and understanding from more than a very few others. I continue to feel bewildered that what always has been so very obvious, implicitly, to me should be so obscure and even repugnant to others.

A Brief History of Natural Inclusion

Natural inclusion is an ongoing evolutionary process of ‘being’ and ‘becoming.’ Our current understanding of the meaning and implications of this process, and the language we use to describe it, also continues to evolve. It did not come into being instantaneously or without trial and error. Your participation is welcome in helping it to develop further in clarity, depth and richness, because no one of us can claim to be an expert authority whose word is final. Natural inclusion can only adequately be appreciated from within diverse real-life experience, not from an isolated viewpoint as a detached observer.

It is important to be aware of the history of our attempts to communicate natural inclusion, otherwise you may get confused when you come across previous incarnations and possible misconceptions of what in essence is a very simple theme.  Natural inclusion is the co-creative inclusion of space and energy within each other to give rise to natural flow-forms, over scales ranging from sub-atomic to galactic. These flow-forms have distinct identities, but are not completely isolated from one another as fully discrete, independent entities. They continually arise and reconfigure as myriad variations upon the same underlying theme.

For Alan Rayner, what had probably been a lifelong unconscious awareness of natural inclusion first started to become explicit in the 1990’s, culminating in the publication of his book, ‘Degrees of Freedom – Living in Dynamic Boundaries’ (Imperial College Press, 1997). The book was prompted especially by his observations of how fungi and other ‘indeterminate life forms’ grow and interrelate with one another and their habitats. Alan recognised that natural boundaries are never rigidly discrete limits that completely isolate insides from outsides, as is assumed by definitive logic. Instead, natural boundaries are dynamic interfacings between inner and outer realms, which vary in their deformability, permeability and connectivity, depending on local circumstances.

Although this landmark book retained the definitive language of abstract perception, notably with respect to such concepts as ‘natural selection’, ‘competition’ and ‘co-operation’, the basic premise underlying this language was questioned, and the need for a more fluid depiction of evolutionary process was recognised. Moreover, the final chapter, ‘Compassion in Place of Strife – the future of human relationships?’, clearly signalled how a shift from definitive to dynamic perceptions of natural boundaries could enable a move from needless hostility,  to loving and respectful  ways of life that are consistent with actual human experience and make sound sense.

Our current understanding of natural inclusion emerged in the year 2000, when this appreciation of the fluidity of natural boundaries was brought into confluence with an awareness of the role of space as a natural ‘presence of absence’ (not absence of presence) or ‘frictionless lubricant’. Space, in other words, is recognised to have a unique kind of agency. The continuous, receptive presence of space everywhere is what makes both the occurrence and mobility of all natural bodily forms as ‘flow-forms’ possible.

The confluence was prompted by the thinking of three people, especially. Doug Caldwell, a Canadian microbiologist had controversially questioned the validity of Darwinian ‘natural selection’ theory, on the basis of his observations of continuous culture systems, which he interpreted in terms of what he called ‘universal information theory’ and ‘nested proliferation theory’.  Ted Lumley, a retired geophysicist, was interested in the way ‘exceptional teams’ flourished, and had come to view rationalistic thought as socially and environmentally damaging. Lere Shakunle, a Nigerian mathematician had developed a new, dynamic way of understanding natural numerical and geometric form, which he called ‘transfigural mathematics’, based on the spatial incorporation of ‘zero’ within natural figures, not as an exception from them. All agreed that there was an urgent need to replace the ‘abstract rationality’ of definitive thought with a more comprehensive perception of Nature, which they called ‘inclusionality’. Alan Rayner later modified this to ‘natural inclusionality’ as a way of thinking based specifically on his understanding of ‘natural inclusion’ as an evolutionary process.

Many efforts followed, both to clarify the meaning and significance of inclusionality, and to communicate this widely. Two new websites were prepared, at www.inclusional-research.org and www.inclusionality.org. Alan Rayner incorporated inclusionality into his research and teaching at the University of Bath. This included a pioneering new trans-disciplinary course entitled ‘Life, Environment & People’, which was presented from 2001 – 2011. (See http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/society_and_humanities/education/higher_education/inclusional-education). Numerous electronically downloadable essays, several peer-reviewed papers and several downloadable books were prepared, and a paperback book, ‘NaturesScope’, was published. (See http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/society_and_humanities/philosophy/naturesscope ) .

While making these efforts, it was necessary to face a variety of challenges:-

•The need to develop a suitable descriptive language that adequately clarifies the meaning and significance of inclusionality, while not becoming so unfamiliar that it would put off newcomers.

•The need to show clearly how inclusionality both relates to and departs from current thinking – notably those forms of thinking known as ‘holism’ and ‘reductionism’.

•The need to recognise and clarify the relevance of inclusionality to a very wide variety of human endeavours (and vice versa): philosophy, mathematics, science, art, psychology, theology, human governance, environmental management, economics and education.

•The profound resistance of academic and lay communities to thinking that challenges, or appears to challenge, deeply embedded beliefs and assumptions propagated by such revered human figures as  Aristotle and Plato, and Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

•Our own misunderstandings and human frailties.

These challenges led to our current specific focus on the meanings and significance of ‘natural inclusion’ – as understood by Alan Rayner – while appreciating with gratitude the contributions made by others to this understanding .  There are clear signs that this new understanding is beginning to contribute in a real way that enables people to live, think and feel as dynamic inclusions of natural energy flow. As Giles Hutchins says at the end of his book, ‘The Illusion of Separation – Exploring the Cause of our Current Crises’ (Floris Books, 2014):

‘We are living, breathing, bodymind portals through which Nature flows, and we are expressions of that Nature. As we reawaken the power of love within us we begin to heal the fragmentation of our psyche and so repair our estranged relation with ourselves, each other and Nature. This is the common ground of humankind’s destiny within which we each have unique tunes to play.’

Estrangement and Reconciliation

The liberating and healing influence of natural inclusionality

For the past several thousand years, humanity has been living through a period of profound and paradoxical ESTRANGEMENT of human from non-human nature, male from female, ‘I’ from ‘You’ and ‘Us’ from ‘Them’. With the advent of the philosophy of NATURAL INCLUSIONALITY, now may be the moment for liberation from this estrangement, bringing with it new hope for RECONCILIATION, HEALING AND CO-CREATIVITY. I express this hope in the following painting, called ‘Vernal Illuminations’:

At the root of the estrangement is, I think, the FALSE perception of a mutually exclusive relationship between darkness and light. This has been enshrined in the definitive logic that abstracts energy/matter from space and embedded in the foundations of orthodox philosophy, mathematics, science and theology. Ultimately, it may have arisen from the desire to have ‘definitive knowledge’ of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and so be able to remove the latter from mortal human form (where mortality is regarded as a consequence of ‘imperfection’). But a very unfortunate by-product of this desire has been the association of ‘Good’ with ‘Light’ and ‘Evil’ with ‘Darkness’, from which all forms of human discriminatory prejudice and hatred arise. It has got us into desperate trouble by setting us at odds with one another and our natural neighbourhood, as represented in my following paintings, ‘Arid Confrontation’ and ‘War of the Pots and Kettles’.

Natural inclusionality shows that this dissociation of darkness from light is a FALSE DICHOTOMY. Space as ‘intangible presence’ and energy as ‘tangible’ presence are DISTINCT BUT MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE. Everything is quite literally 100 % space (‘darkness’) PLUS energy (‘light’).  The very idea that a 'forceful figure of light' can 'expel darkness' and so isolate 'Evil' (portrayed as darkness) from 'Good' (portrayed as 'light'), therefore makes nonsense.

As my friend, Rev. Roy Reynolds put it to me:

“I guess, in order to be consistent in our each-in-the-other thinking, we need to think of every 'thing' as 'space embued,' even starlight itself.  Right?  In other words, energy is not isolable as energy itself.  Energy occurs in context with and in dynamic relation with space.  Right?  If so, we always have the co-union, the partnership, of receptive and responsive-reflective.  We can never have ONLY receptive OR responsive-reflective.”

With that understanding, I think the road to reconciliation opens up, as described in the following poem: 

In the Becoming, All was Well

A limitless pool of infinite depth

Shimmering into form wherever light brought life

To her receptive permissiveness

For a while before resting

Then reshaping into somewhere different

For a while before resting

Life lived in the love of darkness

Darkness loved in the life of light

.

Until the beginning of the Estrangement

When Men took it into their Heads

To exclude one hundred percent of everything

Leaving their selves in splendid isolation

Under the Spell of One Alone

Where darkness couldn’t reach their non-existence

.

Every now and then

Darkness would call from all around their self-annihilation

To be allowed back in

To make their presence meaningful

.

But all they could say from their height of abstraction

Was ‘leave me alone in this world that I own

Amongst others who fight

For my claim to the throne’

.

So committed were they

To their restless toil

That they just couldn’t see

What was coming to boil

Whilst they claimed from somewhere far out of sight

That nothing could overcome

Their Right to be Light

To serve their Good Fight

In the name of their Lord

Who was nowhere to be seen

But glimpsed in flashes

Thundering uproariously

.

On and on and on and on and on and on and on

Ground their relentless distraction

From what was really in their midst

To which they paid their utmost disrespect

Until she could stand for it

Not a moment longer

.

She stamped their blithely marching feet

Upon a different quest

To end her unnatural confinement

Under house arrest

Admitting where she’d been all along

The influence beneath their throng

.

Their journey now just had to turn

Around from their point of no return

Back into the heart of where they belonged

Shimmering to life

In the love of the limitless pool

Amen

.

BOMBSHELLS

The Devastating Mistakes of Abstract Perception

– and how to disarm them through awareness of ‘natural inclusion’

PART ONE

PREVIEW

Abstract perceptions of reality always either encase natural phenomena entirely within non-existent boundary limits, or entirely disregard any source of distinction between natural forms and their surroundings and neighbours.  Unlike natural boundaries, such as skin, abstract boundaries are simplified, orderly and definitive. They completely isolate the insides from the outsides of things and places. Hence they treat Nature either as a whole object in itself, or as a collection of whole objects that are divisible into fractional parts and separated from one another by variable amounts of space and time.  In conventional mathematics, these entities are defined as numerical and geometric figures (discrete numbers and shapes) and in conventional language they are defined as nouns (discrete subjects and objects). Energetic actions of various kinds upon or between these entities are defined as verbs. For the sake of convenient calculation, description and argumentation, Nature is frozen into isolated units of space, energy, time and matter within a superimposed frame of reference that does not actually exist.  The only envisaged alternative to this categorization is to merge all into formlessness. As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, understood, however, nature is always and only properly imagined as variably fluid. Fluidity rules everywhere, and space, time, energy and matter can neither be separated from one another as isolated entities nor united into absolute singularity. 

Through our human habit of imposing these abstract boundary limits onto nature, we introduce something fundamentally anti-natural into our worldview, which not only steers us away from perceiving true nature, but disrupts and damages our natural neighbourhood in a huge variety of ways. Because this habit has such a tenacious grip on our thinking, it can be called "abstract fundamentalism". We adhere to it because we (both in Academia and in society at large) think it is sufficiently useful and correct to "freeze" nature into abstract entities, and to relate with nature as if these entities actually existed.  They do not, and the consequences of living and thinking as if they do have brought devastating consequences for us, psychologically, socially and environmentally.

There is a way out of this devastation, without any loss of useful knowledge, through recognising the principle of ‘natural inclusion’ as the co-evolving flow of energy and space as distinct but mutually inclusive, informative and receptive, presences. Sadly, however, humanity has been habituated to abstract fundamentalism for so long that all of our institutions are built upon it. Whether we speak of engineering, economics, politics, the sciences, or any other field of study or expertise, the predilection for abstract conceptualization remains firmly in place. We try to solve our problems of living using the same kind of thinking that gave rise to them. But the natural truth remains:-

 

Abstract fundamentalism, the imposition of definitive discontinuity onto natural continuity, cannot solve the problems of living it causes.

Introduction

Whether we realize it or not, and no matter how well educated we are or aren’t, all of us in modern cultures have been brought up to perceive ourselves and the natural world in an abstract way that leads us to make all sorts of basic mistakes in the way we live. These mistakes cause psychological, social and environmental harm, ranging in severity from minor quarrels to mental illness, genocide, global warfare and destruction of our natural habitat.

Oddly, this perception is often described as ‘rational’, or even ‘realistic’, so that to question it is assumed to be ‘irrational’, ‘unreasonable’, ‘unrealistic’ and ‘emotional’ . But if we think about it carefully, it becomes clear that this perception is itself based on fundamentally unrealistic assumptions about ourselves and the natural world. It originates in a kind of idealism that reaches back at least to the times of ancient Greece, and most particularly to the definitive logic of Aristotle and others, which to this day underpins modern science, mathematics and technology. Put very simply, this logic holds that one thing cannot simultaneously be another thing. Correspondingly, all natural forms are treated as discrete objects and subjects separated by rigid boundaries and/or gaps of space. C.S. Lewis described this logic as ‘the Whole Philosophy of Hell’, in which ‘to be’ means ‘to be in competition’.

It isn’t difficult – although it is very unusual – for anyone to recognise the fallacy in definitive logic. We can make a start by asking ourselves ‘does this logic correspond with our actual experience of life, and does it make good sense of our experience?’ In particular, does the idea that the inside of anything is cut off from its outside relate to our actual experience? What kind of boundary would be needed to distinguish the space inside something from the space surrounding something without itself including space? Such a boundary couldn’t have any thickness, because if it did, the space within this thickness would be continuous with the space on either side of it. But anything without any thickness would have no real size or shape: a knife that could cut through space without itself including space – like the ‘Subtle Knife’ imagined by Philip Pullman in his ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy – can’t exist as a physical reality: it can only exist as an abstract concept. That is, we can only imagine its existence!

Realistically, we have to recognise that in the natural world, space and whatever informative presence  that distinguishes the inside from the outside of what we call ‘things’ are distinct but mutually inclusive presences, both of which are needed for these things to be distinguishable from one another and their surroundings. Moreover, we can recognise that such mutual inclusion requires one of these presences – space – to be everywhere, motionless, and without substance, and the informative presence that distinguishes different localities in space, to be in continuous motion (because if it were motionless even momentarily it would reduce to no thickness and hence cease to exist). We may then recognise the latter presence as what physicists call ‘energy’, which occurs in two distinctive guises in Nature: weightless, ‘electromagnetic radiation’, and weighty ‘gravitational bodies (matter)’. But, being founded on the unrealistic definitive logic that treats matter and space as mutually exclusive, modern physics gives rise to paradoxical conundrums that obscure this recognition, such as ‘wave-particle duality’ and ‘non-locality’. These conundrums cannot be resolved without changing modern physics’ underlying perception of space and boundaries as sources of definitive exclusivity. We need instead to appreciate that natural space and boundaries are mutually inclusive sources of continuous stillness and continuous mobility, respectively.

To get more of a ‘feel’ for what has just been said, imagine drawing a circle with a pencil on a still sheet of paper. You have to move the pencil point around to produce the circle, while not making the pencil point so utterly sharp and hard as to cut a hole in the paper. The circle is formed by a combination of continuous paper with continuous pencil movement.  Time is implicit in this movement, but, like space, cannot be cut into discrete segments or intervals. The circle is a dynamically formed locality somewhere in ‘place-time’ – the energetic inclusion of space in form and form in space.

We can now dispense with our abstract need to define ‘things’ by recognising how natural space and boundaries actually are and must be as distinct but mutually inclusive presences. We can do this by appreciating:

¥Natural space as an intangible presence everywhere that is not a substance but makes the existence of substance possible

¥Energy as continuous motion that locally in-forms space into bodily presence

Every ‘thing’ or ‘body’ is 100 % space PLUS energy, a dynamic locality somewhere in place-time, not part space and part energy within a completely definable entity or ‘whole’.

Now, having recognised the fallacy in the foundations of abstract perception that cuts energy, time and space into discontinuous units, we can begin to recognise the mistakes it leads us to make in our modern everyday lives, and how these mistakes can be remedied through an appreciation of ourselves and all natural forms as ‘flow-forms’ – ‘natural inclusions’ of space in energy and energy in space, NOT isolated objects and subjects.

Let’s now review these mistakes under a number of generic headings, beginning with the most fundamental:-

Regarding only what is tangible as physically present

This is the mistake upon which the dogma of materialism is founded. This seeks to explain natural phenomena in terms of material properties alone and so explicitly either excludes any kind of immaterial presence from consideration, or treats this presence as if it is actually material. Taken to extremes, it leads to the negation of emotion and the attribution of value only to that which can be quantified precisely. All forms of life, including people, become regarded as machines, and are treated accordingly as ‘performing objects’.

This dogma gathered strength especially during the twentieth century, following upon the widespread acceptance of Darwinian evolution by ‘natural’ selection (‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’) and increasing secularization of society. It was readily assimilated into callous political and economic regimes based on fascism, capitalism and communism and was boosted further by the advent of neo-Darwinian interpretations of social and environmental biology, notably ‘selfish gene’ theory. Despite being widely caricatured in the science and social fiction literature, e.g. in George Orwell’s novel, ‘1984’ and in the stories of ‘Dr Who and the Daleks/Cybermen’, it is deeply embedded in our social, scientific and educational practice and in the basic premises of both ‘reductionism’ and ‘holism’. It is embedded also in those religious belief systems that divide or conflate the ‘material world’ from or with the ‘spirit world’ as independent/unified existences.

The fallacy of materialism lies in the exclusion or conflation of the immaterial presence of space from or with the material presence that couldn’t exist or move without it.

Correspondingly, materialism is based on the abstract concept that matter can be abstracted from or conflated with space – which is not supported by actual experience and does not make consistent sense.

The remedy for this mistake is as simple and obvious as it is revolutionary: we accept, realistically, that material form is a combination of space and energy as distinct but mutually inclusive presences.  Correspondingly, we recognise that all natural form is continuously in flux as what we could aptly call ‘flow-form’, and so cannot rigidly be defined into discrete numerical categories. As William Wordsworth recognised:

‘In Nature, everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness’.

No sooner do we do this, then we come alive with feeling for ourselves and others as natural, dynamic inclusions of our neighbourhood, not subjects distanced from objects. Emotion is no longer divorced from reason. We see the source of so many of our modern and global problems in false dichotomy and false conflation – and hence begin to see a way out of their entrapment. New possibilities emerge for our scientific, mathematical, artistic, spiritual, social, psychological and environmental understandings and endeavours.

Let’s now look in more detail at some of these possibilities, by reviewing some of the other, inter-related, mistakes that arise from overlooking the vitality of intangible presence.

Mistaking emotion for lack of reason

Detachment of the observer from emotional involvement with the observed has been recognised as a requirement of objective reasoning since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. This emotional detachment has been thought to be so essential to the making of impartial judgements that any expression of emotion has become inimical to abstract scientific methodology and discourse. Charles Darwin put it this way:-

"A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone."

Objective science and its underpinning definitive logic have hence gained a reputation for cold-heartedness, which is as off-putting to romantics as romanticism is to those who regard themselves as ‘hard scientists’. The resulting alienation of emotionality from science and vice versa has been psychologically, socially and environmentally damaging – a crippling negation of what truly ‘natural’ science has to offer for understanding of our place in the world as it actually is, and is a source of dreadful cruelty in the treatment of ourselves and other living creatures as ‘machines’.

The fallacy in alienating emotion from reason resides in the fact that there is good reason for the existence of emotion:  emotion is no more and no less than an expression of the natural energy flow (‘e-motion’) responsible for the emergence of living form.

The alienation of emotion from our natural understanding of life is hence, quite literally, deadening. It numbs us from awareness of what it means to be alive, by closing the door on the possibility of appreciating ourselves as inextricable natural dynamic inclusions of our neighbourhood. It renders our view partial and prejudiced, not comprehensively impartial.

For example:-

Many of us have experience – as employees, students and patients – of how unpleasant it feels to be judged solely on our performance and treated without empathy as a machine, especially a defective machine, by managers, teachers and the medical profession. Just when we have most need of feeling cared for and reassured, we find ourselves placed in stark, uncomfortable surroundings and exposed to tests of our competence and health that if not ‘passed’ satisfactorily can seriously jeopardise our prospects. This lack of empathy that we encounter is a direct and sometimes deliberate product of objective detachment. Here is how John Keegan (The Face of Battle. London: Pimlico, 2004) describes military training:-

‘…the deliberate injection of emotion…will seriously hinder, if not altogether defeat, the aim of officer-training. That aim…is to reduce the conduct of war to a set of rules and a system of procedures – and thereby make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive. It is an aim analogous to that pursued by medical schools in their fostering among students of a detached attitude to pain and distress… the rote-learning and repetitive form and the categorical, reductive quality …has an important and intended psychological effect. Anti-militarists would call it depersonalizing and even dehumanizing. But given…that battles are going to happen, it is powerfully beneficial…one is helping him to avert the onset of fear, or, worse, of panic… ’

Notice the assumption here: ‘given that battles are going to happen’. This is what objectification of ourselves as machines ultimately does. It depicts life as a battleground – a ‘struggle for existence’ – in which anxiety is the last thing we want.

Anxiety, as the product of sensitivity to uncertainty and compassion for self and others, is, however, actually a powerful and realistic deterrent from conflict – a means of avoiding battles! Running away from the ‘face of battle’ is eminently sensible! It is true that there are situations in which anxiety can be disabling – you don’t want a surgeon to have a panic attack in the middle of an operation! The real source of comfort in such situations is, however, not vainly to deny emotion, but to accept and soothe it through awareness of the source of most profound calmness deep within oneself.

NATURAL INCLUSION FOR THE YOUNG OF HEART AND MIND

A WORD FROM THE WISE

NATURAL INCLUSION FOR THE YOUNG OF HEART AND MIND

INTRODUCTION

The imaginary conversation set out below shows how a ‘youngster’, i.e. anyone with a truly open mind and heart, could readily be helped by an experienced mentor to realize that everything in Nature is made of space and energy as distinct but mutually inclusive presences. This simple realization of what has been called ‘natural inclusion’ is denied by abstract logic and materialism, which is rooted in the assumption that space and matter are mutually exclusive or confining. This assumption damagingly and paradoxically discounts the infinite omnipresence and receptive influence of space from the evolution of the natural world and our human place within it.

THE CONVERSATION

YOUNGSTER:  What is the world made of?

MENTOR: It’s like this …most people might try to answer that question by describing some kind of substance or material, like ‘earth’ or ‘air’ or ‘fire’ or ‘water’  or some combination of these. But actually, when you think about it carefully, you will realise that the most basic kind of presence in the world is not really a substance at all, but has to be present for any kind of substance to exist. Can you imagine what this presence is – a presence that makes the existence of substance possible, but isn’t itself a substance? We need to think about this presence first. Where is this presence, and what does it feel like?

YOUNGSTER: I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about – it sounds a bit strange in one way, but really obvious in another – so obvious that I can hardly dare say it for fear of making a fool of myself.

MENTOR: What I’m talking about is NATURAL SPACE ….and it’s everywhere, within, throughout and all around what we think of as ‘substance’ and ‘things’ made of substance. It’s actually 100 % of ‘things’ and ‘substance’. That is, things and substance are always full of space – they don’t contain variable proportions of space and something other than space. But space itself feels like…’nothing’…an absence of substance – extremely ‘slippery’! We can’t grasp it, we can’t cut it, we can’t smell it or hear it or see it – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t here, there and everywhere, eternally. If we remove substance from it, it doesn’t go away – it stays exactly where it is – as what some people call ‘vacuum’, an absence of pressure, and its slipperiness then makes it feel like it ‘sucks’ things into itself,  because any substance with pressure slips within it. When I walk through it, I don’t push it aside, because it isn’t a substance – it slips straight through me! Try to imagine where I would be without space within, throughout and all around me. I’d have no shape or size. I’d be nowhere.

YOUNGSTER: Now I wish I’d said that – I thought you’d be meaning something more obscure and complicated!

MENTOR: If we’re truly to understand anything, it’s always best to begin with what’s most obviously and simply true, from our actual experience of living in the world. So, what would this presence be like if it didn’t include any other kind of presence? It would still be here, there and everywhere, without beginning or ending – what we call ‘continuous’, but it would be without sound, without light, without any kind of form and…without time. But we know from experience that the world isn’t like that, don’t we? And we also know that the world is a planet orbiting a star, which we call the sun, and that the universe contains a huge number of stars, which circulate in enormous whirlpool-like swirls that we call galaxies. And everywhere, as far as our most powerful telescopes can see, and beyond, there is space, within, throughout and beyond all that we can see.

So our experience tells us that in addition to space everywhere, there has to be another kind of presence that both includes and is included in space, which goes into making these natural forms, but would itself be nowhere without the space that enables these forms to have shape and size. If space is everywhere and utterly still, what would this other presence need to be like if the forms it goes into making are not to vanish into nowhere?

YOUNGSTER: Well, if space is absolutely everywhere and utterly still, wouldn’t the other kind of presence have to be somewhere local but moving? Like when I use a pencil point to draw something on a sheet of paper, I have to move the pencil point around if it is not just to make a dot.

MENTOR: That’s right! It would have to be continuously moving, like a blur not stopping still even for what we call a ‘moment’, because if it did stop still for a moment, it would vanish into nowhere in no time – a vanishing ‘point’ with no size or shape. This continuously moving presence is what we call energy. When it gets packaged into local forms, like when you use your pencil point to draw a figure on a sheet of paper, we call it ‘matter’ and when it is not packaged in this way, we call it ‘radiation’ or, more specifically, when we can detect its presence visually, ‘light’. And it’s this continuous movement of energy that gives us the impression of ‘time passing’ and ‘forms appearing’.

So, that’s my answer to your question, the world is made of 100 % space plus energy – stillness and mobility combined together as a ‘flow-form’. Simple, really, isn’t it?

So every "thing" in the world, the world itself, and all the worlds beyond are patterns or forms of flow of energy within and around natural space.

Therefore … all natural space and all things remain mutually inclusive.

Hence we live in a world of "NATURAL INCLUSION", the co-creative flow of energy and space as distinct but mutually inclusive presences.

YOUNGSTER: … So how does that affect our understanding of ‘things’?

MENTOR: Well, it means that what we call material ‘things’ are never independent solid objects (or subjects) with rigidly defined boundaries that isolate what’s inside them from what’s outside them. They don’t and can’t occupy space, because space actually occupies them and is present everywhere. All things being flow forms of natural space, they and their dynamic boundaries remain open to other existing and new flow forms.

YOUNGSTER: Why is it important to understand that?

MENTOR: – Because it helps us to be aware of how we really are in the world as it really is. Without this awareness we draw mistaken conclusions about ourselves and our natural neighbourhood, which badly damage our relationships with one another. It is an especially profound mistake for us to discount the receptive influence of space everywhere on natural energy flow. This influence is very easily overlooked because ‘space’ seems like ‘nothing’. It seems like an absence of presence somewhere – a ‘gap or distance between and outside of things’ instead of a presence everywhere that includes and is included in all natural forms as flow-forms.

You might have noticed that our everyday language and logic takes for granted that things can be isolated from each other and counted as if they are separate, self-contained objects – like detaching an apple from an apple tree and defining and naming it as a ‘thing in itself’, ‘an apple’. We do this regardless of where the apple has come from and what it is going to become when we eat it. This is what underlies the abstract idea that one thing cannot simultaneously be another thing, upon which entire systems of abstract thought have been built. To this day, these systems dominate the way we think of ourselves as detached from and in opposition to our natural neighbourhood instead of as expressions of our natural neighbourhood. It makes us think and behave selfishly and antagonistically towards others, and removes our imaginative capacity to relate empathically to one another – i.e. to be aware of how it feels to be in another’s place. We live at odds with ourselves and one another instead of in co-creative, natural communion.

You’ve maybe also noticed that in science and in other formal arguments, well defined objects and boundaries are assumed, defined or artificially created in order to proceed logically and methodically. Now, this exclusively objective approach appears to be immensely important and valuable. So successful in fact that almost all of society’s accepted understanding and knowledge of the world is based on it. The fact that the world really comprises naturally inclusive flow forms, is therefore obscured and easily forgotten, and once forgotten is extremely hard to re-learn from the objective knowledge and logic that remains embedded in society.

So, if we proceed in the world in ignorance of Natural Inclusion, we make misguided and bad decisions about what are the right things to do. Our definitive thinking appears to reward us, because it enables us to make calculations and predictions that are very accurate. But it comes at a terrible cost to our humanity, and actually isn’t even necessary in the way that we think it is, because the same calculations and predictions would be possible – along with a much deeper understanding of nature and human nature – from natural inclusion.

From Unnatural Alienation to the Natural Inclusion of Each in the Other

  — Shifting Our Perception of Space and Boundaries

As far as I can recall, I have always felt a close kinship with Nature. I have recognised that what is all around me cannot be isolated from and is just as vital to who and how I am as what is inside me. It is also continually changing. Correspondingly, you are all included in my world just as much as I am included in yours – I think Bob Dylan once said something like that. We live inescapably within each other’s natural neighbourhood.

Having long perceived my self and all other natural forms as inhabiting each other’s neighbourhood, I have been dismayed by the fact that most people nowadays don’t feel quite the same way. Instead, our cultural and educational institutions teach us, from a young age, to perceive our selves and others as if we were hermetically sealed units, that is as isolated objects set apart from one another and Nature by rigid boundaries and gaps of space, like the solid-looking coloured balls in the static 3-dimensional diagram on the left of this image (gesturing to slide) and unlike the dynamically bounded flow-form I made on the right by moving sand around in space.

Over 40 years ago, I illustrated my feelings about the terrible damage caused by this alienating perception in a painting called ‘Arid Confrontation’.

Slide 2:- Abstract Space and Boundaries [Alienation from Natural Neighbourhood]

We mentally sever our selves from each other and the creative wildness of the natural world by setting in place a barricade that enforces profound social and psychological conflict and environmental destruction. Instead of loving our neighbourhood as a source of sustenance for our self-identity to come into being and be included within, like my sand-whirl, we make an enemy of whatever we perceive and label to be on the ‘other’ side of a rigidly defined boundary. That is, we mentally exclude from ‘me’ or ‘us’ whatever we define to be ‘outside’ of ‘me’ or ‘us’, and then seek to control or eliminate it in acts of exploitation and war.

Recall Hamlet’s famous soliloquy and where it led him: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, OR, to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them’.

Nowhere has this abstract sense of severance of ‘each from the other’ by rigid boundaries been more prevalent than in modern science. It is embedded in Darwin’s view of ‘natural selection’ as ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’, and is associated with the idea that evolutionary success is dependent on the competitive elimination of others. Even Albert Einstein declared that ‘the environment is everything that isn’t me’.

And yet, if we stop to think carefully about why we impose these definitive limits on ourselves and Nature, it becomes clear that to do so simply cannot make sense. Ask yourselves what kind of a boundary could actually separate the space within you from the space around you without itself including space? That’s right: it would have to have no thickness and hence be nowhere! The intangible, frictionless, space within you and without you is continuous throughout you! As I move around (gesture), space is slipping through me – I am not moving space aside from me. Space is an intangible presence. My body, like all bodies, is a tangible, permeable and variably cohesive presence that includes and is included in space. Space gives material form somewhere to exist and move around in – it is not a material in itself. So what the Devil have we been doing, for millennia, by not only pretending that zero-thickness boundaries exist, but actually incorporating this pretence into our systems of abstract logic, conventional mathematics, objectivist science, hierarchical governance and elitist education? Here, according to C.S. Lewis is what the Devil himself liked about it:

Slide 3. Diabolical Definition

“The Whole Philosophy of Hell…rests on a recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specifically, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours…’To be’ means to be in competition”. (C.S. Lewis “The Screwtape Letters”)

So, how can we liberate ourselves from this hellish mental isolation of one self from another self by definitive boundaries and gaps of space?

Slide 4. The Natural Inclusion of Each in the Other

I think we can liberate ourselves simply by recognising how natural space and boundaries actually are and must be as distinct but mutually inclusive presences. We can do this by appreciating:

¥Space as a continuous, limitless, frictionless and hence receptive presence everywhere that provides freedom for movement

¥Energy as a resistive, responsive presence that continuously flows into somewhere in the form of dynamic bodily boundaries that distinguish and interface between but do not isolate inner and outer space

When we think about it, everything is 100 % space PLUS energy, not part space and part energy. That’s how Nature is, including human nature.

Now I think a vital principle of life and love as mutually inclusive presences begins to emerge –

Slide 5: ‘Holding Openness’ – Life and Love

This painting, ‘Holding Openness’, expresses how all natural form is the co-creation of continuously mobile, informative presence (energy) and continuous receptive presence (space). Light cannot Live without Darkness (i.e. space), Darkness is Void without light. Each necessarily includes and is included in the other.

This perception differs radically from the common portrayal of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ as opposites on either side of a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Just think how far-reaching the implications of a shift to this different perception would be! It would free us from divisive belief in a struggle for existence (‘to be’) against non-existence (‘not to be’), to an acceptance of living bodily boundaries continuously circulating and reconfiguring within a limitless sea of receptivity, not holding their own against a sea of troubles.

Instead of thinking of ‘Number One’ as  ‘One alone’ or ‘I Alone’, or ‘Me Alone’, or ‘Us Alone’ or ‘You Alone’ we come to recognise that

Slide 6: Where Space is Continuous and Boundaries are Dynamic
One is never an independent object

As William Wordsworth once declared:

‘In nature, everything is distinct, yet nothing is defined into absolute, independent singleness’.

And so it is that when all is in the flowing mutuality of energy and space, any kind of mathematics or science that either excludes space from matter as a dimensionless point of mass, or conflates space with matter as One and the same self-contained ‘Whole’, entire of it self – cannot make natural sense. [Truly natural numbers and geometric figures both include and are included in space: they are never ‘alone’ or ‘All One’.]

Now I’d like to introduce some observations that helped to reveal this radically different perception of individual and collective identity to me, through showing how fungi are capable of sustainable growth in circumstances where their supplies of energy vary.

Slide 7. Sustainable Growth of Fungi in ‘Abundance’ and ‘Scarcity’

Describe images of reproductive fruit body and mycelial production team in ‘matrix’

What we are witnessing here is the ability of a dynamic living organization to change its pattern of growth in direct response to its neighbourhood. In conditions of abundance it multiplies; in conditions of scarcity it conserves and redistributes what it already has in the process of preparing and exploring for more to come its way. Unlike our current, divisive social and economic systems that are based on abstract perceptions of space and boundaries, it does not borrow what it hasn’t got from a future that hasn’t come in order to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals!

Isn’t there a very simple lesson in this for human organizations? That is:

Slide 8: In Sustainable Natural Communities Life is a gift of energy to be received, sustained and passed on in natural relay

In this painting, the dying of an elm tree brings possibilities for a multitude of life forms to supersede and inhabit it. Without death, life as a manifestation of natural energy flow stalls. In Nature, death feeds life, not the other way round. [And where energy is the currency of life, the abstract economic notion of growth in excess of available resources by borrowing from the future is unsustainable.]

This brings me to consider how evolutionary diversification arises through a dynamic transformational process of natural inclusion of each in the other, NOT competitive elimination of one by the other falsely perceived as an opponent of self:

Slide 9: Perceiving  Evolutionary Diversification as a Process of Natural Inclusion

I call this painting ‘Future Present’, and it is indeed intended to convey a ‘Perception of the Future’ in which the ‘Present’ is not a definitive line or ‘cut’, drawn between Past and Future, but a continual ‘bringing of past into the coming of future in the process of natural energy flow. The evolutionary diversification of life is here perceived as a fluid dynamic process of cumulative energetic transformation of each in others’ co-creative influence, over vastly differing scales from microcosm to macrocosm. It cannot be prescribed or contained in a rigidly defined box of genetic information alone, frozen in discontinuous time and space.

Well, now I fear I’m getting into deep water and approaching my cut-off time limit for this talk! But before I reach this, I want to offer some thought about how a new perception of space and boundaries could allay our deeply entrenched fear of ‘what’s on the other side’ through appreciating ‘uncertainty’ as ‘the imagination of Nature’ expressed in natural flow-form as an energetic inclusion of space.

Slide 10: Perceiving Nature as Imagination Itself

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature as all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see nature at all. But by the eyes of a man of imagination, nature is imagination itself”

William Blake

“Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall”

Robert Frost

Perhaps by cherishing uncertainty as a vital ingredient of life and love, instead of seeking to remove or wall off uncertainty, we can let go of our hankering to define things into an abstract, unnatural order, and learn to perceive and live in a more passionate, compassionate and sustainable way than we currently do.

Dynamic Continuity — Why is natural form continuously in motion?

This issue is of crucial significance in appreciating the 'paradigm shift' or, rather, 'Paradigm inversion', made by 'natural inclusionality'. It is one I have found particularly tantalizing myself in terms of 'taxing my imagination to the limit', and finding the words to explain it in a way that will help others get into the necessary 'dynamic framing of mind' has been equally tantalizing. I have lain awake in the small hours trying to 'imagine it out' - and had to tussle with the definitive logic that I, like almost everyone else in modern culture, has had imposed on their education. I get that 'now I see it, now I don't' effect as, I guess, my left and right brain hemispheres come into mutual challenge. The 'Aha!' followed by the 'OhNo', followed by the 'Aha!'

 

The basic thing that definitive logic can't cope with is the notion that something can be in two different places at the same time. This is what quantum theory accepts at very small spatial scales but is left unable to explicate except in 'Alice-in-Wonderland' terms. It is usually said or implied that 'the [definitive] rules of physics change when observing at very small scales'.

 

Readers of this short account may find it helpful to watch and/or re-watch my short video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI

 

What I am suggesting is that this difficulty is an artifact of imposing non-existing definitive limits upon what is naturally continuous - in effect by cutting 'space' and/or 'time' into independent segments and rigid frames. This is what calculus does - in much the same way as a cine film - chops continuous motion into discrete segments or 'freeze frames', then fudges them back together again by making the intervals sufficiently small that we don't notice the disjunctions between them if they are made to run past a fixed point of observation at sufficient 'speed'. It's OK as a calculating tool or way of generating a 'simulation' of the original continuous movement, but it is not OK to say this is what Nature does to make a curve or movement.

 

OK let's go back to the explanation made in the video and elsewhere. Binary logic cuts space - as zero - apart from numerical form, as '1'. So we have 'either zero (absence) or 1 (presence) [not zero as an inclusion of 1]. Notice that SPACE HAS BEEN 'DISCOUNTED' FROM NUMERICAL FORM (WHAT COUNTS). Nature has been chopped into freeze frames, and all the king’s horses and all the king's men cannot put them together again except by means of a convenient external 'fudge factor' called 'force'. No sooner do you chop the flow then you stall the flow - you have destroyed the dynamic continuity.

 

In the video and elsewhere I explain that for form to have any shape or size, and hence be 'somewhere', not 'nowhere', whatever it is that distinguishes natural form from its surroundings MUST include space and cannot exclude space from itself (for to 'devoid itself of space' would reduce it to nowhere). No natural form can be subdivided into 'part matter, part space'. (It can, however, be distinguished into locally inhabited and uninhabited space). What is called 'matter' cannot therefore be isolated from space as definite particles (these would be nowhere) but must be diffused in some way - but not as a stationary 'cloud of particles'. We arrive at the recognition that whatever distinguishes natural form from 'pure space' cannot be particulate and has therefore to be in flux (i.e. 'flow-form').

Encyclement — A Natural Inclusional Cosmology of Life and Love

Throughout our history, we human beings have sought knowledge not only of our own past and future but also that of the natural world and cosmos we inhabit. What kind of compulsion is it that induces us to make this quest, while other life forms appear to sustain themselves through renewable cycles of living, birthing and dying simply by doing what comes naturally to them? Whatever it is, it seems to be underlain by a feeling that without it, we feel lost and out of control in an unfathomable and complex labyrinth within which our lives have become inescapably entrapped, with the only way out and back in being through an entrance/exit marked ‘Birth/Death’. This feeling of uncertainty may make us scared silly of some kind of soul-devouring Minotaur that awaits us deep within the labyrinth or a judgmental figure at its entrance/exit who may or may not let us pass. ‘Knowledge is Power’, we may then tell our selves, and with it we can determine our destiny through our own free will, rather than have it decided by some ‘external judge’ or ‘pit-dwelling devourer’ beyond our influence: we can gain dominion over Nature by discovering its hidden rules and turning them to our advantage by knowing the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We can play-act knowing the ‘Mind of God’. Alternatively, or in addition, we may journey in the humble hope of finding some ultimate source of truth, goodness, love and illumination in the depths or beyond the entrance/exit gate, which will care for us ‘unconditionally’ – but, paradoxically, only if we have ‘faith’ in it and request forgiveness for our departures from its code of practice!

Perhaps inevitably, this quest has brought our interest in knowing ‘the truth’ into tension with our desire to live fulfilling and meaningful lives and our fear of what will become of us and those we love in an uncertain and ultimately unknowable future beyond our immediate sensory perceptions. Given this tension, how can our enquiry into the nature of our being and becoming ever be truly impartial, i.e. comprehensive and unbiased? Is it possible to avoid being influenced by what we would dearly like or not like to know?

The tension between seeking to know ‘truth’ and wishing to know that ‘all will be as we most desire’, not as we most fear, has evolved into the ideological conflicts between different belief systems that have raged for millennia and continue to do so. These conflicts are made all the more destructive through the invention of increasingly potent weaponry. If they are to be resolved peacefully, there is a clear need to develop a view of nature and ourselves that most if not all of us can readily accept is consistent with actual experience and that makes consistent sense, not paradox.

This is a where a truly impartial, natural scientific approach could be of great and lasting benefit to humankind. Unfortunately the objectivist methodology of most modern science is anything but impartial because it deliberately excludes consideration of anything other than physically tangible and hence quantitatively definable (i.e. ‘measurable’) natural presence. This unnatural exclusion is rooted in the abstract, definitive logic, which holds that the only alternative to contradiction (“it is impossible for the same object to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same object and in the same respect”) is unity (“all objects will be one”). By imposing an absolute discontinuity between material and immaterial presence, such logic – which is embedded in the foundations of classical and modern mathematics – is not only paradoxical and inconsistent with actual experience, but also brings the objectivist science built on its foundation into collision with any kind of non-materialistic religious or spiritual belief. Its underpinning belief in and desire for the ultimate definability and predictability of nature – the abstract, hard-lined rules of ‘the labyrinth’ – merely serves to reinforce conflict, not to bring the much needed relief that could be gained from a more comprehensive and widely acceptable approach. In its quest for certainty, one way or the other it impales us on the Minotaur’s horns of dilemma instead of enabling us to leap clean between their opposing menace. 

I think that a more natural and comprehensive scientific approach than that espoused by objective abstraction is possible. I have called this approach ‘natural inclusionality’. It arises from impartially addressing the simple question: ‘what, most fundamentally, makes any natural form distinguishable from its surroundings?’ (see video illustration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI). It becomes apparent that the only way of answering this question is to acknowledge the occurrence of at least two kinds of natural presence: (1) a receptive context or non-resistive medium, which provides freedom for local movement and/or expression; (2) local formative content, which informs or configures that context. The former is necessarily spacious, the latter necessarily cohesive. Moreover, for form to be and become distinguishable, each of these presences must naturally include the other. Spacious presence alone would be formless void, and formative presence alone would have no shape or size. They are necessarily distinct, but mutually inclusive presences. They can neither be abstracted from one another as independent entities, nor be homogenized into ‘Oneness’. The only way in which this necessity can be fulfilled is for one of these presences, natural space, ultimately to be everywhere, continuous, intangible (i.e. frictionless/non-resistive) and immobile, and for the other ultimately to be somewhere, distinctive, tangible and continually in motion. Try whirring your hand around in front of your face until it appears as a blur, and you may get a feel for how all distinguishable form will ultimately appear this way when viewed sufficiently closely (i.e. at sufficient magnification) and for sufficient duration - if the whirring stops even for a moment, so too does 'time', and the mutual inclusiveness of each in the other breaks down irretrievably. Natural space and figural boundaries are hence, respectively, continuous and dynamically continuous energetic interfacings and distinctions between the insides and outsides of all natural forms as flow-forms.

What emerges from natural inclusionality is a view of natural geometry as intrinsically dynamic – an ‘Encyclement’ or 'Becoming Hole' of vortical/toroidal flow, not a ‘Pre-defined Whole’ of permanently crystalline Form (see http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/2341?tab=article&title=becoming-hole; http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/1798?tab=article&title=place-time-the-flow-geometry-of-space). By its very nature, such flow-geometry is impossible to express adequately in definitive linguistic or mathematical terms. The 'hole point' of natural inclusionality is that in a dynamic reality of natural energy flow ('place-time'), there are no such things as complete 'wholes' and 'parts' and neither space nor time can be cut into discrete segments. All is in a flux of variable viscosity – continual circulation – and can be seen to be so if examined sufficiently closely and for sufficient duration. Natural ‘Time’ is implicit within this flux, not an abstract, one-size fits all, independent measure set apart from it in order to assess its ‘speed’. In terms of life experience a mouse may live as long as a Galapagos tortoise.

 

The fundamental physicality of this flow-geometry becomes possible to infer (not rationalistically deduce or induce) no sooner than one has acknowledged the mutual inclusion of continuous receptive space and continuously mobile energy in the process of rendering natural bodily form distinguishable from yet not isolated from its surroundings. There is no metaphysics (super-naturalism) here. There is only the inference of how things must be and become if space and energy/form are to be mutually inclusive. For they must be and become this way if the cosmos is not to collapse onto the motionless, timeless, formless condition of nowhere and nothingness of the 'singularity' (dimensionless point mass) assumed by abstract 'big bang cosmology' and embedded in the abstract foundations of classical and modern mathematics.

 

Appreciation of this natural inclusional flow-geometry enables us to review afresh some ancient ideas regarding the fundamental nature of life, love and their dynamic relationship. 'Eros' corresponds with 'radiant energy' (~light/electromagnetic radiation), ‘Agape’ with receptive space in the heart of bodily form and continuous with receptive space everywhere, and ‘Philia’ with 'bodily energy', which circulates around local centres of Agape (~gravity) to give rise to bodily flow-form. None of these can express their reciprocal co-creative potential in the absence of the other

 

The form of a vortex or spiral galaxy visualizes the erotic radial flow of energy towards and the philial circumferential flow around local centres of agape (eye of the storms, 'black holes') rather beautifully. So, there we have it - natural inclusional cosmology in a dynamic nutshell, with nothing supernatural and everything extra-ordinary about it. With this cosmology in mind, we are free to wander open-heartedly in the wildness of natural flow-geometry, released from hard-lined artifice. But as we do so, it is important not to look back in longing for the false sense of freedom and security offered by pre-definition – for, if we do so, the Medusa of abstract rationality will be sure to reinforce her stony grip and impale us on one or other of the Minotaur’s horns of dilemma.

Becoming Hole — A Natural Inclusional Guide to Well-Being, Beyond All-Oneness

http://thenatureofbusiness.org/2013/09/27/living-with-opposite-mindedness/

The Emergence of a Natural Inclusional Guide to Self-Sustenance

By Alan Rayner

Alan Rayner is a British scientist and originator of a scientific-philosophy called ‘Natural Inclusionality’ .  Here he wears his heart on his sleeve and in-so-doing shares with us his trials, tribulations and profound insights.

Since childhood, I have been one of those people who is quick to recognise and appreciate the truths and falsehoods on both sides of an argument, rather than feel obliged to favour one over the other. Possibly I developed this ability through being the offspring of an acutely analytical yet nature-loving father and a broadly intuitive yet socially and politically active mother. Despite their deep and lasting love for each other and for me, their sometimes violent arguments and actions often left me feeling stranded in the middle and sometimes a target of their opposing attitudes of mind. This led me to ‘see’, through my child’s eye view and peace-making efforts, the need both for a way of distinguishing between individual identities and a way of including them within each other’s influence as co-creative partners, not opponents. Nothing could be more natural and obvious, I have always thought and felt.

In the process of growing up, and throughout my adult life in a prevailingly adversarial culture, I have therefore been bewildered and concerned that what came to appear so natural and obvious to me seems so readily ignored, invisible, obscured or denied by most people. I have wondered what stops people (including my dear, late parents) either from seeing what I see or from giving voice to and living in accordance with my vision of the natural world and our human place in it. Is there something unusual about my perception, and if so, what? Do most people have a ‘blind spot’, or do I? Could it be that most people actually perceive in the same way as I do, but are somehow dissuaded from acknowledging it? Is there some imaginative leap that I am naturally able to make that other people can’t or haven’t yet made? Have other people been cajoled or misled by tradition or authoritarian leadership (as were my parents) to accept as ‘true’ what is clearly not consistent with my observations and does not make consistent sense? Are they so bewildered by the contradictions of opposing attitudes that they prefer not to think about it and just get on with their lives as best they can? Following that path leaves it to an ‘elite class’ to hoodwink, divide and overrule those who are bewildered (this is a very common condition, I suspect, alluded to by Noam Chomsky as ‘the bewildered herd’). Whatever the reason may be, it has been and is deeply troubling to me to have learned about, witnessed and experienced how it feels to be a casualty of the needless cruelties and conflicts that arise between intransigently opposed attitudes of mind. Such hostility is evident throughout ancient and modern human history to the present day. Surely I am not the only person to be troubled by it, and to recognise its origin in a restrictive way of seeing, which overlooks the natural source of continuity throughout the cosmos and imposes a false barrier or gap between one identity and another in its place?

Aware as I have become of the profound paradox that arises when an individual identity is mentally cut off from or completely subsumed within the company in which it occurs, a pressing and persistent question for me continues to be ‘how, honestly, i.e. with due respect for natural truth, can anyone live with this non-sense?’ This question arises from the fact that no-one can live entirely outside or sealed off from the influence of the natural or cultural context into which they are born. The notion of individual independence upon which analytical opposite-mindedness (and, for that matter, the Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’) depends cannot hold true for any life form that needs to assimilate energy from its surroundings in order to sustain itself. There is a life-inviting context that simply goes unrecognized by analysis alone. By the same token, no distinctive self- or group-identity can be completely dependent upon or interconnected with others if it is to have any room for individuation, growth and movement. The receptive, intangible space into which that self or group is free to grow and move cannot be excluded from its reach.

As a young life-form, dependent on my parents to feed, clothe and protect me, my own first and inevitable recourse was simply to ‘play along with’ their opposite-mindedness – to try to bend my will towards whatever they each expected of me. Unfortunately, quite a lot was expected, especially by way of my father’s ambition for me to ‘follow his masculine footsteps’ into a career in plant and fungal science via King’s College, Cambridge. This I duly and dutifully did, for I shared and delighted in his love of the natural world, in spite of and perhaps also because of the hefty dose of ‘feminine’ intuitive feeling for living form, and associated disrespect for exactitude, that I may have drawn from my mother (she played along with my father’s ambition at the same time as she questioned its social, environmental and psychological relevance). I learned the analytical and Darwinian ‘rules of the game’ of objective, reductionist science, gained a first class degree, followed by a PhD, a University Lectureship, a Readership (when such titles still meant something in the UK) and Presidency of the British Mycological Society.

Then I came to a full stop in 1999 at the age of 49. I finally lost my nerve and willingness to keep playing the game. Looking back, I think this was due partly to the ambition and carelessness of some of my peers – even ones I had caringly learned from, taught and nurtured – which prompted them to promote their work by deprecating mine. Such practice was and is considered ‘fair play’ in this ultra-competitive, Darwinian world, and I can’t pretend that I was entirely innocent of it myself. But there was also something else about the way the game is played that had always appalled me – a profoundly unscientific willingness to overlook natural truth for the sake of ‘winning’. I wasn’t honestly prepared to do that. Indeed much of my own scientific research had involved revealing what I see as the natural and obvious truth that the ecological sustainability of life-forms in natural communities arises qualitatively, from the fluidity and presence of their boundaries as dynamic interfacings. It does not and cannot arise from the quantitative definability or absence of their boundaries as rigid partitions. Many scientists, both previous and present, have been and are predisposed to overlook this reality in their pursuit of academic success.

So, playing the game didn’t work out for me in the long run, and I began my next phase of ‘trying to live with it’ (and continue to have an income) – rebellion from the sidelines. Now it was my mother’s turn to have her footsteps followed. I began to ask questions about the social, environmental and psychological relevance and impact of objective science. I pioneered a trans-disciplinary final year undergraduate course called ‘Life, Environment & People’ that encouraged students to do the same. Some of my colleagues and external examiners didn’t approve and tried to ‘stamp it out’ or at least ‘tame it’ into subservience to their status quo. Nonetheless, I managed to keep it going for 11 years, and I continue to hope that its influence will persist and eventually find expression amongst some of the 400 or so students who passed through it.

During this phase, the iniquities and false premises of opposite-mindedness finally became utterly clear to me. I recognised that for thousands of years we human beings have been teaching ourselves to think along mutually exclusive paths of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’, ‘materialism’ and ‘spiritualism’, which contradict how we naturally are in the world as it naturally is. This exclusivity – this opposite-mindedness – leads to different kinds of ‘identity-abuse’. In a nutshell, I realized that these exclusive paths arise from a loveless interplay between fear and lust. This results either in a domineering egotistic quest for control over what is perceived as ‘other than self’ or a submissive self-subjugation to other. These come respectively with an unrealistic sense of either absolute responsibility and freedom or absolute passivity and security. They encourage and are reinforced by the abstract reduction and severance of ‘somewhere’ (as a naturally dynamic locality) and ‘everywhere’ (as a naturally limitless openness), into ‘something’ (as a discrete ‘point mass’) and ‘everything’ (as a collective aggregate), surrounded by featureless void. In effect, the infinite, ubiquitous natural presence of invisible, immaterial space is squeezed out of or confined within material form. This exclusion or confinement destroys the mutually inclusive relationship of energetic mobility and spatial receptivity and sets the stage for what I call ‘opposite-mindedness’ to self-perpetuate as the root source of an adversarial way of life.

My scientific enquiries affirmed that life forms simply cannot be isolated from or confine their spatial context but are by their very nature receptive, responsive and reciprocating to others in a continuous process of natural energy flow. For many years now, I have been struggling to find a way to make this as clear to others as it is to me, so as to help bring about both my own and their release from the abstract abusiveness of opposite-mindedness. But it has proved extremely difficult, not least because opposite-mindedness has ‘built-in intransigence’, a psychological refusal to hear what it doesn’t want to hear – no matter how ‘reasonable’ and/or ‘truthful’ – in order to sustain its false premises. Moreover, opposite-mindedness is built in to the very foundations of abstract logic, language, mathematics, science, religion, education and governance that have supported its façade for millennia. Even today, with the advances quantum physics has made in uncovering the intangibility within matter and locality, our philosophical-scientific-cultural assumption rests on matter being exclusive from space – false dichotomy (i.e. severance of one from other) is deeply woven into our historic and present mind-set.

To point to a flaw in the foundations of objectivist science is to invite fear of collapse of all that humanity has perceived as the ‘progress of human civilization’ over the ages. Yet, actually, it is what is desperately needed to prevent collapse by bringing the fluidity and flexibility of natural form as a dynamic inclusion of receptive space into due consideration. Rigidity of logic and vision belie the dynamic quality of Nature.

I try every verbal and non-verbal means of communication I can muster, but still find very little by way of a receptive and responsive audience ready to help convey the message more widely. In this situation I find it difficult to resist the temptation to become resigned and/or embittered and either succumb to or fight opposite-mindedness with opposite-mindedness. But to do that would be to follow my parents’ footsteps into the very trap that has held humanity bound either in the vindictive dynamics of ‘tit-for-tat’ antipathy or the sterile oppressiveness of dominance-submission between what are and have been complementary worldviews for millennia. There is an option that evades this trap and is consistent with evidence, through acknowledgement of the mutual inclusiveness of continuous receptive space and mobile form. Now that we know this, we need to embrace it.

So, what might we call this natural and obvious truth that I have been banging on about? For the sake of having a convenient, yet adequately descriptive label to attach to it, I have called it ‘natural inclusion’ (or ‘natural inclusionality’ as the associated ‘way of thinking’). The label, in itself, doesn’t matter, of course – what does matter is what the label is attached to. The simplest introduction I have managed so far (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI ) is to ask the question: what, most fundamentally is needed to make natural form distinguishable from its surroundings?’ If that question is addressed honestly and imaginatively, without prejudice, the simple answer is inescapable. But its social, scientific, environmental, mathematical, theological, psychological, educational, social and political implications are profound: we simply have to loosen the foundations of the way we have been teaching ourselves to perceive and engage with each other and our natural neighbourhood for generations. We are all pooled together within a limitless receptive presence and yet distinct in our own right. We are inclusive and reciprocating beings yet differentiated and special – as William Wordsworth poetically recognized:  “in nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness”.

Meanwhile, I have to continue to consider how anyone like me can honestly continue to live with opposite-mindedness if natural inclusionality doesn’t catch on in the foreseeable future? I can only be sure that I won’t play along with the logic of opposition and I won’t oppose it even as I resist it and help others to resist it as long and as ably as I can. Meanwhile, I will continue to be inspired and enthused by immersing myself in the wildness of the natural world, and encourage others to do likewise. For here, such opposite-mindedness as has been perpetuated by Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and others simply does not occur, notwithstanding all the territoriality, aggression, and loving and living that really and truly are present in Nature.

Becoming Hole — A Natural Inclusional Guide to Well-Being, Beyond All-Oneness

I recently came across a short article by a practicing integrative psychotherapist, which recommended becoming ‘all-one’ as a cure for the loneliness that afflicts so many people in our ‘fragmented society’, through ‘losing connection with ourselves’. By ‘connecting with ourselves’ and becoming ‘all-one’ (~alone), she said, we could ‘either be alone (all-one) and content, or with somebody and content’ – a win-win choice that enables any one and every one to say ‘goodbye’ to the distress of ‘loneliness’.

On the one hand, I could readily agree with the author that a common reason for feeling lonely arises from a loss of awareness of our innermost needs, and a resultant over-dependence upon other people to care for and motivate us. But on the other, I saw a danger that her single-minded advocacy of ‘all-oneness’ (autonomy) was simply replacing one form of identity-abuse, ‘self-excommunication’, with another, ‘self-encapsulation’ (see http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/2326?tab=article&title=what-s-wrong-with-i-and-we-).

The truth is that any adequate understanding of loneliness depends on being aware of how we human beings naturally are in the world as it naturally is – and neither a completely analytical (‘reductionist’) nor an integrative (‘holistic’) approach alone, is capable of providing this. Both these latter approaches have the effect of abstracting natural self- or group-identity out of spatial context, as a singular figure (i.e. ‘one’) or body, and in so-doing isolating this entity from its natural neighbourhood. Such abstraction, which has become deeply culturally entrenched in the way we have been teaching ourselves to think for millennia renders ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ into a lonesome figure, an ‘all-oneness’. It is a cause of loneliness, not a cure! William Wordsworth recognised this clearly when he said:

“In Nature, everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness”

So, instead of advocating one form or other of self-abstraction as a cure for loneliness, we need to find a natural cure for self-abstraction! Ironically, finding and describing such a cure in an adversarial culture of ‘single-mindedness’ has been my lonely intellectual and emotional path throughout my life and especially since the turn of the millennium (see http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/2337?tab=article&title=living-with-opposite-mindedness-the-emergence-of-a-natural-inclusional-guide-to-self-sustenance). 

I have called this cure for self-abstraction ‘natural inclusionality’. It can be revealed simply by asking the question: ‘what, most fundamentally, makes any natural form distinguishable from its surroundings?’ (see video illustration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI). It becomes apparent that the only way of answering this question is to acknowledge the occurrence of at least two kinds of natural presence: (1) a receptive context or non-resistive medium, which provides freedom for local movement and/or expression; (2) local formative content, which informs or configures that context. The former is necessarily spacious, the latter necessarily cohesive. Moreover, for form to be and become distinguishable, each of these presences must naturally include the other. Spacious presence alone would be formless void, and formative presence alone would have no shape or size. They are necessarily distinct, but mutually inclusive presences. They can neither be abstracted from one another as independent entities, nor be homogenized into ‘Oneness’. The only way in which this necessity can be fulfilled is for one of these presences, natural space, ultimately to be everywhere, continuous, intangible (i.e. frictionless/non-resistive) and immobile, and for the other ultimately to be somewhere, distinctive, tangible and continually in motion. Try whirring your hand around in front of your face until it appears as a blur, and you may get a feel for how all distinguishable form will ultimately appear this way when viewed sufficiently closely (i.e. at sufficient magnification) and for sufficient duration - if the whirring stops even for a moment, so too does 'time', and the mutual inclusiveness of each in the other breaks down irretrievably. Natural space and figural boundaries are hence, respectively, continuous and dynamically continuous energetic interfacings and distinctions between the insides and outsides of all natural forms as flow-forms.

In a nutshell, abstract thinking has destroyed the natural continuity between self and neighbourhood by severing space from or confining space within fixed figural form. Its remedy is simple – open up to our selves as dynamically bounded holes within and as an inclusion of continuous, intangible space, not stationary wholes of all-oneness. Allow ourselves to be wells of ebb and flow within and as living expressions of our natural neighbourhood – don’t contain our selves within stagnant silos. With that remedy we can release ourselves from the alienations and confinements of loneliness that continue to afflict so many of us, including me, to this day. The question is – who might want to join me in natural inclusional communion, and who would prefer to stick to their guns of one form of self-abstraction or another?

The Emergence of a Natural Inclusional Guide to Self-Sustenance

Since childhood, I have been one of those people who is quick to recognise and appreciate the truths and falsehoods on both sides of an argument, rather than feel obliged to favour one over the other. Possibly I developed this ability through being the offspring of an acutely analytical yet nature-loving father and a broadly intuitive yet socially and politically active mother. Despite their deep and lasting love for each other and for me, their sometimes violent arguments and actions often left me feeling stranded in the middle and sometimes a target of their opposing attitudes of mind. This led me to ‘see’, through my child’s eye view and peace-making efforts, the need both for a way of distinguishing between individual identities and a way of including them within each other’s influence as co-creative partners, not opponents. Nothing could be more natural and obvious, I have always thought and felt.

In the process of growing up, and throughout my adult life in a prevailingly adversarial culture, I have therefore been bewildered and concerned that what came to appear so natural and obvious to me seems so readily ignored, invisible, obscured or denied by most people. I have wondered what stops people (including my dear, late parents) either from seeing what I see or from giving voice to and living in accordance with my vision of the natural world and our human place in it. Is there something unusual about my perception, and if so, what? Do most people have a ‘blind spot’, or do I? Could it be that most people actually perceive in the same way as I do, but are somehow dissuaded from acknowledging it? Is there some imaginative leap that I am naturally able to make that other people can’t or haven’t yet made? Have other people been cajoled or misled by tradition or authoritarian leadership (as were my parents) to accept as ‘true’ what is clearly not consistent with my observations and does not make consistent sense? Are they so bewildered by the contradictions of opposing attitudes that they prefer not to think about it and just get on with their lives as best they can? Following that path leaves it to an ‘elite class’ to hoodwink, divide and overrule those who are bewildered (this is a very common condition, I suspect, alluded to by Noam Chomsky as ‘the bewildered herd’). Whatever the reason may be, it has been and is deeply troubling to me to have learned about, witnessed and experienced how it feels to be a casualty of the needless cruelties and conflicts that arise between intransigently opposed attitudes of mind. Such hostility is evident throughout ancient and modern human history to the present day. Surely I am not the only person to be troubled by it, and to recognise its origin in a restrictive way of seeing, which overlooks the natural source of continuity throughout the cosmos and imposes a false barrier or gap between one identity and another in its place?

Aware as I have become of the profound paradox that arises when an individual identity is mentally cut off from or completely subsumed within the company in which it occurs, a pressing and persistent question for me continues to be ‘how, honestly, i.e. with due respect for natural truth, can anyone live with this non-sense?’ This question arises from the fact that no-one can live entirely outside or sealed off from the influence of the natural or cultural context into which they are born. The notion of individual independence upon which analytical opposite-mindedness (and, for that matter, the Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’) depends cannot hold true for any life form that needs to assimilate energy from its surroundings in order to sustain itself. There is a life-inviting context that simply goes unrecognized by analysis alone. By the same token, no distinctive self- or group-identity can be completely dependent upon or interconnected with others if it is to have any room for individuation, growth and movement. The receptive, intangible space into which that self or group is free to grow and move cannot be excluded from its reach.

As a young life-form, dependent on my parents to feed, clothe and protect me, my own first and inevitable recourse was simply to ‘play along with’ their opposite-mindedness – to try to bend my will towards whatever they each expected of me. Unfortunately, quite a lot was expected, especially by way of my father’s ambition for me to ‘follow his masculine footsteps’ into a career in plant and fungal science via King’s College, Cambridge. This I duly and dutifully did, for I shared and delighted in his love of the natural world, in spite of and perhaps also because of the hefty dose of ‘feminine’ intuitive feeling for living form, and associated disrespect for exactitude, that I may have drawn from my mother (she played along with my father’s ambition at the same time as she questioned its social, environmental and psychological relevance). I learned the analytical and Darwinian ‘rules of the game’ of objective, reductionist science, gained a first class degree, followed by a PhD, a University Lectureship, a Readership (when such titles still meant something in the UK) and Presidency of the British Mycological Society.

Then I came to a full stop in 1999 at the age of 49. I finally lost my nerve and willingness to keep playing the game. Looking back, I think this was due partly to the ambition and carelessness of some of my peers – even ones I had caringly learned from, taught and nurtured – which prompted them to promote their work by deprecating mine. Such practice was and is considered ‘fair play’ in this ultra-competitive, Darwinian world, and I can’t pretend that I was entirely innocent of it myself. But there was also something else about the way the game is played that had always appalled me – a profoundly unscientific willingness to overlook natural truth for the sake of ‘winning’. I wasn’t honestly prepared to do that. Indeed much of my own scientific research had involved revealing what I see as the natural and obvious truth that the ecological sustainability of life-forms in natural communities arises qualitatively, from the fluidity and presence of their boundaries as dynamic interfacings. It does not and cannot arise from the quantitative definability or absence of their boundaries as rigid partitions. Many scientists, both previous and present, have been and are predisposed to overlook this reality in their pursuit of academic success.

So, playing the game didn’t work out for me in the long run, and I began my next phase of ‘trying to live with it’ (and continue to have an income) – rebellion from the sidelines. Now it was my mother’s turn to have her footsteps followed. I began to ask questions about the social, environmental and psychological relevance and impact of objective science. I pioneered a trans-disciplinary final year undergraduate course called ‘Life, Environment & People’ that encouraged students to do the same. Some of my colleagues and external examiners didn’t approve and tried to ‘stamp it out’ or at least ‘tame it’ into subservience to their status quo. Nonetheless, I managed to keep it going for 11 years, and I continue to hope that its influence will persist and eventually find expression amongst some of the 400 or so students who passed through it.

During this phase, the iniquities and false premises of opposite-mindedness finally became utterly clear to me. I recognised that for thousands of years we human beings have been teaching ourselves to think along mutually exclusive paths of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’, ‘materialism’ and ‘spiritualism’, which contradict how we naturally are in the world as it naturally is. This exclusivity – this opposite-mindedness – leads to different kinds of ‘identity-abuse’. In a nutshell, I realized that these exclusive paths arise from a loveless interplay between fear and lust. This results either in a domineering egotistic quest for control over what is perceived as ‘other than self’ or a submissive self-subjugation to other. These come respectively with an unrealistic sense of either absolute responsibility and freedom or absolute passivity and security. They encourage and are reinforced by the abstract reduction and severance of ‘somewhere’ (as a naturally dynamic locality) and ‘everywhere’ (as a naturally limitless openness), into ‘something’ (as a discrete ‘point mass’) and ‘everything’ (as a collective aggregate), surrounded by featureless void. In effect, the infinite, ubiquitous natural presence of invisible, immaterial space is squeezed out of or confined within material form. This exclusion or confinement destroys the mutually inclusive relationship of energetic mobility and spatial receptivity and sets the stage for what I call ‘opposite-mindedness’ to self-perpetuate as the root source of an adversarial way of life.

My scientific enquiries affirmed that life forms simply cannot be isolated from or confine their spatial context but are by their very nature receptive, responsive and reciprocating to others in a continuous process of natural energy flow. For many years now, I have been struggling to find a way to make this as clear to others as it is to me, so as to help bring about both my own and their release from the abstract abusiveness of opposite-mindedness. But it has proved extremely difficult, not least because opposite-mindedness has ‘built-in intransigence’, a psychological refusal to hear what it doesn’t want to hear – no matter how ‘reasonable’ and/or ‘truthful’ – in order to sustain its false premises. Moreover, opposite-mindedness is built in to the very foundations of abstract logic, language, mathematics, science, religion, education and governance that have supported its façade for millennia. Even today, with the advances quantum physics has made in uncovering the intangibility within matter and locality, our philosophical-scientific-cultural assumption rests on matter being exclusive from space – false dichotomy (i.e. severance of one from other) is deeply woven into our historic and present mind-set.

To point to a flaw in the foundations of objectivist science is to invite fear of collapse of all that humanity has perceived as the ‘progress of human civilization’ over the ages. Yet, actually, it is what is desperately needed to prevent collapse by bringing the fluidity and flexibility of natural form as a dynamic inclusion of receptive space into due consideration. Rigidity of logic and vision belie the dynamic quality of Nature.

I try every verbal and non-verbal means of communication I can muster, but still find very little by way of a receptive and responsive audience ready to help convey the message more widely. In this situation I find it difficult to resist the temptation to become resigned and/or embittered and either succumb to or fight opposite-mindedness with opposite-mindedness. But to do that would be to follow my parents’ footsteps into the very trap that has held humanity bound either in the vindictive dynamics of ‘tit-for-tat’ antipathy or the sterile oppressiveness of dominance-submission between what are and have been complementary worldviews for millennia. There is an option that evades this trap and is consistent with evidence, through acknowledgement of the mutual inclusiveness of continuous receptive space and mobile form. Now that we know this, we need to embrace it.

So, what might we call this natural and obvious truth that I have been banging on about? For the sake of having a convenient, yet adequately descriptive label to attach to it, I have called it ‘natural inclusion’ (or ‘natural inclusionality’ as the associated ‘way of thinking’). The label, in itself, doesn’t matter, of course – what does matter is what the label is attached to. The simplest introduction I have managed so far (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CGvQX3eNjI ) is to ask the question: what, most fundamentally is needed to make natural form distinguishable from its surroundings?’ If that question is addressed honestly and imaginatively, without prejudice, the simple answer is inescapable. But its social, scientific, environmental, mathematical, theological, psychological, educational, social and political implications are profound: we simply have to loosen the foundations of the way we have been teaching ourselves to perceive and engage with each other and our natural neighbourhood for generations. We are all pooled together within a limitless receptive presence and yet distinct in our own right. We are inclusive and reciprocating beings yet differentiated and special – as William Wordsworth poetically recognized:  “in nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness”.

Meanwhile, I have to continue to consider how anyone like me can honestly continue to live with opposite-mindedness if natural inclusionality doesn’t catch on in the foreseeable future? I can only be sure that I won’t play along with the logic of opposition and I won’t oppose it even as I resist it and help others to resist it as long and as ably as I can. Meanwhile, I will continue to be inspired and enthused by immersing myself in the wildness of the natural world, and encourage others to do likewise. For here, such opposite-mindedness as has been perpetuated by Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and others simply does not occur, notwithstanding all the territoriality, aggression, and loving and living that really and truly are present in Nature.