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As we sit within the sharing circle and discuss the behaviour of the objects we have seen in front of us,

we become aware of our own inclusion in the dynamical flow of a common living space.

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And Now the Book! ... free download ... A Fluid Dynamical Worldview ... view cover/summary

INCLUSIONALITY:

Lifting away the fog of cultural self-deception

see also www.inclusional-research.org

‘Inclusionality’ lifts away the scientifically-secularized religious concept of ‘local sovereign being’ (the notional ‘existence’ of local independent objects with the God-in-the-machine powers of internally originating behaviour), subsuming it with a more natural and realistic nonlocal, fluid-dynamical spatial energy-flow based understanding.

When the flow of solar irradiance cyclically intensifies, the fluid-dynamics of the earth’s atmosphere are brought ‘towards the boil’ and what we observe is a gathering (forming) and scattering (subducting) and intensifying-in-strength and diminishing-in-strength of locally-appearing ‘boil-like’ dynamical forms in the earth’s atmosphere that we call ‘hurricanes’.

When science ‘zooms in’ on a hurricane, it is able to explain it LOCALLY in terms of thermal flows using a Euclidian space-frame to localize things, wherein the circulations are seen as going ‘up’, ‘down’ and ‘sideways’, influenced by FORCES associated with thermal differences and gravitational ‘density flows’.

The scientific ‘local-object-izing’ of the locally-appearing dynamical form in the ‘boiling fluid’ referentially ‘bolts’ the structural model to its nonlocal fluid-dynamical space-inferred center (which we now understand to be ‘its local object-center) and synthetically equips it with God-like internal powers of originating ‘its own’ behaviour, eclipsing the fact that ‘it’ is in reality a locally-appearing dynamical form whose ‘powers’ derive from nowhere else but the nonlocal fluid-dynamical spatial continuum in which it is an ‘included flow-form’.

From its former status as a locally appearing dynamical form in a nonlocal fluid-dynamical spatial continuum, science has transformed this dynamical entity into a local independently-existing object-system with God-in-the-machine powers of internally-originating behaviour.

After we have re-cast this dynamical feature as a ‘local object’, name-labelled it ‘Rita’, scientifically explained its behaviour in local-internally-originating terms and have begun speaking of it as if it were an independent being that ‘is heading north towards Houston’ and is ‘wreaking damage along the coast’, we have lost track of the fact that ‘it’ is NOT REALLY AN ‘IT”, an ‘independently existing local organism/system’, but is instead a ‘locally-appearing dynamical form within an otherwise invisible (featureless) fluid-dynamical energy-flow.’ That is, as Kepler and Poincaré have both observed, in our scientific modeling of nature, we tend to choose “not that which is most true but that which is most easy.” The atmospheric fluid-dynamic and the dust-devil, like the wavefield and the water-wave, while coming from the same natural phenomena, flag that fact that what is made manifest to our observing minds (the locally-appearing dynamical form) is simply the visible dynamical-child of the otherwise invisible mother-dynamic.

Local objects, to which we implicitly attribute God-in-the-machine powers of internally-originating behaviour, such as ‘genes’, ‘cells’, ‘organisms’, ‘systems’ and ‘organisations’, when restored in our understanding to their original ‘inclusional’ condition, derive all of their power from the nonlocal dynamical spatial continuum of nature (the ‘spacetime continuum’) that they are included in. They are no longer seen as ‘powerboating’ their way through ‘the vacuum of a fixed Euclidian containing space/frame ‘under their own steam’, and are instead understood as locally-appearing dynamical forms within a nonlocal all-pervading fluid-dynamical energy-flow in the manner that storms, hurricanes and tornadoes are locally manifesting forms in an otherwise invisible fluid-dynamical space.

‘Inclusionality’ provides a reminder of our western penchant for re-casting locally-APPEARING dynamical forms as discrete and independently-existing LOCAL OBJECTS, eclipsing from the observer’s view their real sourcing of power from the otherwise invisible (were it not for these dynamical forms) fluid-dynamical energy-flow. This artificial ‘eclipsing’ of their real source of power is thus an artefact of scientifically objectifying these locally-appearing dynamical forms and notionally equipping them with God-in-the-machine powers of internally originating behaviour.

This transforming of locally-appearing dynamical forms, in an otherwise invisible energy-flow continuum, thanks to this western scientifically-secularized theological operation that has us mentally impose into them God-like powers of internal-first-cause behavioural origination, has become so automatic and habitual that we pass over it without recalling that we are choosing “those concepts that are not most true but which are most easy.’

Having created local, internally-powered beings or ‘independent causal agents’ from locally-appearing dynamical forms in the energy-flow continuum, we go on to compound the error of this approximation by claiming these ‘independent local beings’ to be ‘fully and solely responsible for their own behaviours’.

By this manner of thinking, we develop political and economic theory wherein the farmer is taken to be ‘causally responsible for’ his agricultural harvest and the organisation is taken to be ‘causally responsible for’ its productive achievements and the sovereign nation-object is taken to be responsible for its diverse multiplicity of productive achievements etc. etc. Thus the true source of power in the energy-flow continuum of nature is ‘eclipsed’ by this ‘foreground objectification’, as when we objectify and name-label locally appearing dynamical forms in the atmosphere (e.g. hurricanes), explain their internal powers of local originating behaviour by way of ad hoc ‘local forces’ and ‘local flows’, making them ‘causally responsible’ for wreaking destruction on cities and coastlines etc.

Such a theory/paradigm, couched in terms of local causal agents cannot give us an understanding of those same situations where we suspend our imposing of local object-being and for example see the hurricanes as ‘boils’ in the fluid dynamical space of the atmosphere induced by solar irradiance cycles that gather and scatter, intensify and diminish, showing their ‘true colours’, that of locally appearing dynamical forms within a fluid-dynamical energy-flow space.

* * *

In sum, ‘inclusionality’ is a straight-forward concept that speaks to a more natural and realistic way of understanding the dynamics of the world we live.

If we ‘take relativity to heart’, with its understanding that energy-flow is more foundational to an understanding of dynamics than ‘material objects’ and ‘what they do’, ... then we get ‘inclusionality’.

Inclusionality gives us to understand that the world is a fluid energy dynamic and that what we have been calling ‘objects’; i.e. local material bodies or material organisms. that we say are ‘are independently-existing’,... lose their scientific legitimacy since ‘objects’ are not meaningful in a world that is ‘fluidly flowing’. In fact, what we have been calling ‘objects’, in a fluid-dynamical world, become, instead, ‘locally-appearing dynamical forms in the fluid-dynamical spatial continuum’ (or, ‘nature’). These dynamical forms are induced into shape by, and give shape to, the dynamics of the receptive spatial context that they both include and are included in.   That is, they include the fluid dynamical space they are included in, and it is their unique situation within this continuum, a situation born of continuing scattering-gathering in the service of restoring and sustaining dynamical balance, that gives them their particularity of dynamical form.

This fluid-dynamical understanding (‘inclusionality’, as an awareness of the 'Tao’ and ‘Logos’) is naturally viable and logically self-consistent.  It is simply ‘what we get’ when we let go of the popular modeling of dynamics in terms of local, independent objects/organisms with internally-originating behaviour.

Now, it is no small challenge, to shift our mode of understanding ‘dynamics’ and ‘the world dynamic’ from the standard cultural basis of ‘local objects’ to the non-standard alien-to-culture basis of ‘nonlocal fluid-(energy-)-dynamics’, but this is what ‘inclusionality’ implies is necessary, to get our actions back in harmony with our natural experience (i.e. stop the dysfunction that arises from imagining ourselves as ‘local, independent-existing objects with God-like powers of locally originating behaviour).

Everywhere we used to think in terms of ‘objects’, we have to shift to thinking in terms of ‘convection cells’ (purely relational dynamical forms), and everywhere we used to think in terms of ‘organisms’, we have to shift to thinking in terms of ‘ecologies’ (purely relational dynamical formations wherein the dynamic of the collective transcends the dynamics of the individuals in the collective, as is always the case in fluid-dynamical flow-forms. E.g. see figure below where, in the bee-cells, soap-bubbles and convection-cells in boiling water, the collective of locally-appearing spherical forms channels influence back from ‘the nonlocal’ to ‘the local’ to reshape the form of its individual participants in a manner that is clearly not coming from God-like powers of locally originating behaviour.).

That is, in an object-free fluid energy-flow, we can never separate the foreground ‘entities’ from the background ‘flow’; i.e. the former is included in the latter in the manner the ‘foreground’ tornado is included in the ‘background’ dynamical space of the atmosphere (and beyond). Instead of regarding a rock or a human being as ‘local, independent objects in a void and static Euclidian containing space ‘reference frame’ (wherein we bolt the structural description of a locally-appearing dynamical form to ‘its’ own center), ...’inclusionality’ would have us envisage them as ‘locally-appearing dynamical forms’ in the ‘nonlocal dynamical spatial continuum (energy-flow) of nature’.

When our natural living space is understood as an energy flow, what we used to call ‘objects’ or ‘things’ we now understand instead as ‘dynamical forms’ (such as convection-cells) within the flow, in the manner of a tornado within the flowing airspace of the atmosphere. It may be convenient (‘most easy’) to ‘objectify’ the tornado and speak of it as if it were a ‘local thing in its own right’, but we know it is ‘most true’ to regard the ‘tornado’, NOT as a local object that has ‘its own behaviour’ but instead, ‘inclusionally’, ... as a dynamical form in a flow that is itself invisible, yet ‘inferred’ by the locally-appearing yet ‘relative’ movements of the dynamical forms.

Inclusionality would have us understand ourselves, individual human organisms, in this same way, as ‘locally-appearing dynamical forms (convection cells) in the nonlocal dynamical spatial continuum of nature’ (the ‘energy-flow’ that is ‘nature’).

And like the tornado or hurricane in the dynamical space of the atmosphere, we can understand ourselves as locally-appearing dynamical forms that give manifest expression to the ‘nonlocal mother-energy-flow’ as she pursues the sustaining of dynamical balance within her continually transforming self.

Our birth does seem to be like a ‘gathering’ and our death like a ‘scattering’ as in fluid-flow and we do all seem to ‘boil’ up together in a flow and to run together in a common passage like the ‘boils’ in a flowing stream, and if we open up to the notion of the universe as a nonlocal fluid-dynamical spatial continuum, ... then there is not that far to go to conceive of a continuing circle of scattering-feeding-gathering (death-feeding-life) as in nature’s solar-powered water cycle (from mountains down river valleys into ocean basins and back to sky and down again in unbroken cyclic continuity), to the point that one may begin to understand where one is in the whereness-is-oneness poetic understanding of North American aboriginals who ‘tread lightly’ because in the rain that falls and renews the ground are the faces of the not-yet-born.

Of course we are free to deny our ‘inclusional reality’ and we can persist in imposing a ‘local object-ized God-in-the-machine’ view of our ‘self’ and ‘collective others’ on our own mentally modeling apparatus, but such objectification is not imposed on nature, and so, as rich and powerful farmers priding ourselves on our agricultural harvests, and in the process eclipsing the true origins of our power, we may one day suffocate in our own pesticides.

Far better to acknowledge that we have opted for ‘objectification’, a scientifically-secularized theological concept, ‘not because it is most true but because it is most easy’, ... and for matters that lie close to the heart, accept that we are nothing other than ‘locally-appearing dynamical forms in the ‘nonlocal fluid-dynamical spatial continuum’ wherein it is the intrinsic mission of all such forms to serve the sustaining of dynamical balance and harmony, according to the unique particulars of their situational inclusion.

--- Ted Lumley, November 2, 2007

February 12, 2006

Hello!

Welcome to the goodshare.org website (the personal website of ted lumley). The writings on this website are the outwellings of an intention of developing a deeper understanding of the dynamical space in which we share our life experience, and how we are jointly bound up with and within it (see The ‘Law’ and its Application , Sept 15, 2006). The website is organized in a kind of ‘paleogeologically layered’ way so that it is possible to ‘drill down’ and read what was written and what the perspective was back in 1995, 1997-2000, 2001-2002 , the 2001-2005 vintage home page , an ongoing blog sharing personal impressions of local and world events and/or a continually updated SOS in English, Français and Deutsch (whoops, my intentions to translate into french and german have not yet been realized). (the ‘SOS’ page is a compendium of observations which invite the question ‘Science or Superstition’).

This graphic at the top of this page is an important symbolic on this effort to better understand our common living space. It was drawn by Montréal artist Jacques Rainville (dual Abenaki and Québecois-French heritage) and represents a native style ‘learning circle’ (also known as ‘sharing circle’ or ‘healing circle’). It depicts, looking down in plan view, eight participants (note their eyelashes) each with a personal experience-shaped view of the world (represented by the screen show that is going on at the arc at the outermost edge of the ‘triangle’ that projects from their eyes). As they share their heartfelt experiences, relaxing the notion that ‘their personal reality is the true reality’, a holodynamical understanding of the dynamical world hostspace we all share inclusion in forms like a ‘virtual crystal ball’ in the center. This graphic is often used on this website juxtaposed for contrast against its western Euro-American counterpart which shows a similar group debating about whose personal view of reality is ‘the most truthful’ and the jigsaw/patchquilt ‘understanding’ that results from this right/wrong conflict with its patches of purported truth weighted according to the relative political power of the contributor (a marked contrast with the coherency-coming-from-commonality based ‘holographic truth’).

This current vintage of introduction attempts to employ the maximum succinctness that this writer (an ‘INFP’ in Myers-Briggs terminology) is capable of.

So with that, let the terse account of findings-to-date begin with the ‘keystone’ issue; (see also the letter to the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers at www.goodshare.org/grandmas.htm )

1. Major dysfunction arises in our western-culture-dominated society from our tradition of speaking and thinking in terms of ‘what things do’.

There is a ‘gap’ between our thinking and talking about reality in terms of ‘what things do’ versus ‘the behaviours of things’ that is the source of massive, pervasive ‘incoherence’ in our individual and collective behaviours. The reality we talk about and seek to modify is not the reality we experience. Thus our attempts to ‘build a better tomorrow’ wherein peace and harmony are sustained cannot possibly occur so long as we continue to guide our behaviour and operate on ‘the wrong reality’, a reality based on ‘what things do’ that misses the mark and in no way describes ‘the behaviour of things’.

Everywhere in our culture, and particularly in the media and in the universities, we are silently encouraged to accept views of reality in terms of ‘what things do’ (the causal actions of local independent objects with local object-center-driven behaviours).

This promotes a general ‘insanity’ which is what we are currently living in and using to guide our political activism and self-management and governance schemes.

There is ‘nothing wrong’ with our interpersonal relations, the informal way we live and love. We simply ‘go with our experience’ in these activities. The problem comes when we raise our eyes, look out into the world and ask ‘what is going on out there and what should our response be?’ This is where the dysfunction enters our lives, by way of our socio-political mental modeling and responses which are, mistakenly, in terms of ‘what things do’ (As a simplified descriptive tool, there is no problem with the ‘what things do’ model, the problems arise when it is confused with ‘reality’ so that ‘what we do’ based on the ‘what things do’ model has very different results from those we intend; i.e. our actions are not deterministic but spatially transformative.)

The picnics, love affairs, family activities, game-playing on the corner lot, meditating in the forest, in the mountains or at sea, …. all of these are free from this western ‘what things do’ dysfunction, but everything that has to do with ‘judgement and analysis of what is going on out there’ in the media, in management and in government on a ‘what things do’ basis, is subject to it.

We could say that ‘how we relate spontaneously with one other’ is free from it, and ‘how we deliberately organize to ‘deterministically’ modify our socio-political reality and to ‘construct a better tomorrow’ for ourselves is infused with it (incoherence and dysfunction).

The gap between ‘what things do’ and ‘the behaviour of things’

At first glance, it may appear that these two phrases; ‘what things do’… and… ‘the behaviour of things’ cannot express anything different, but a moment’s reflection can bring you back to the same problem faced by Isaac Newton as he tried to formulate laws that described celestial dynamics. He found that he could describe the solar system dynamic in terms of ‘what the planets do’ (acting from their internal centers outward) but he could not explain ‘the behaviour of the planets’ (in an outside-inward sense relative to the celestial hostspace dynamic; i.e. how was it that they came into, and sustained this harmonious clustering?).

You can see the difference now, in that ‘what things do’ is a mental model that ignores the fact that these things are included within the dynamic of a larger hostspace whereas ‘the behaviour of things’ is more ambiguous and ‘leaves the door open’, for example, for things being whipped about by the influence of the space they are included in, in the manner that electrically charged particles are whipped about in an electromagnetic field.

[Relativity and ‘field’ physics have subsumed, through mass-energy equivalence, the notion of a material entity as an ‘independent object’, and instead represent ‘things’ as coherent concentrations of energy in a common spatial-relational energy-flow-field (spacetime continuum). When speaking of whorls in a flow, the two phrases; ‘what whorls do’ (as local-center-based authors of behaviour) and ‘the behaviour of whorls’ (as nonlocal-acentric inferences of overall behaviour) convey very different meanings.]

Our western ‘default’ for reality modeling is ‘what things do’. There is no place in this model to account for behaviours of things being inductively shaped by the space they are situationally included in. That is, this ‘what things do’ model orients the dynamics to the centers of the things and constructs the overall dynamic of action, transaction, interaction in this inside-outward in temporal sequence fashion (for example, ‘the earth rotates’, as Poincaré points out, makes it appear as if the action of the earth comes from the local [axial] center of itself when it is instead nonlocally sourced). If there ‘is’ any outside-inward shaping influence on ‘the behaviour of things’, it cannot be accounted for in this western ‘default’ manner of constructing ‘reality models’.

Our experience informs us that we cannot ignore outside-inward influence on ‘the behaviour of things’. If we are a group of people in a cart that is being taken to the guillotine, we are aware that we have ‘free will’ and that, within the cart, we can do what we want to do. If the cart was big enough and our trip was long enough, we could construct a little community in it, with a university in which we developed scientific laws based on ‘what things do’ and validated them in laboratory experiments. There would be nothing in any of this that would contradict this ‘what things do’ based reality. But of course, all the while we are discussing and responding to this ‘what things do’ sub-reality, we are inextricably included in an evolving flow-dynamic, the French Revolutionary dynamic which in turn nests within the evolutionary dynamic of the natural world. The ‘bigger story’ concerns our inclusion within the hostspace flow-dynamic within which we can REDUCE our awareness and focus on a lesser reality constructed on the basis of ‘what things do’.

In our inside-the-cart community, our attention is fully taken up by, for example, ‘building a better tomorrow’ for our community. We may become so pre-occupied with this and so proud of our ‘free will’, our ‘independence’ of behaviour and our creative constructivism that underpins our individual ‘assertive accomplishments’ that we forget about the ‘bigger story’ of our inclusion within a hostspace flow-dynamic (evolutionary flow-dynamic) which is going to prevail regardless of our best-laid plans in this, our ‘what things do’ reality.

In the modern era where communications technology instantly and frequently permeates our global village discursive ambiance, we come to know things through ‘the media’ and today’s media follows the Euro-American default of presenting ‘reality’ in terms of ‘what things do’. This in turn incites us to respond to this pseudo-reality and to get involved in ‘making things happen’. The ‘politician-in-us’ encourages us to ‘work together to build the community of our dreams’. Politicians everywhere are encouraging different groups of us to do this in different ways, and all at the same time. What happens when a multiplicity of social collectives simultaneously work on making their dream realities come true when they are included in a common hostspace that does not even figure in their forward-constructivist dream reality? (As politicians that embrace this ‘what things do’ sub-reality’ as ‘reality’, we have formally declared the ‘independence’ of our nations, as well as our individual citizens, and proclaimed that all men and all nations have equal rights to their individual pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.).

How ‘realistic’ is such behaviour? Our local experience informs us of what happens within a shared space when a particular group starts doing their own thing and ignoring how this is encroaching on the activities of others included within the common space. We do not ‘really’ live in absolute empty and infinite space as is the implicit ‘Euclidian’ foundation of a space-ignoring reality based on entirely on ‘what things do’.

The only reasonable way to manage the dynamics of multiple communities sharing a common space such as the finite and unbounded space on the surface of the earth is to put into precedence the sustaining of global balance (dynamical equilibrium) and harmony. To put the ‘individual’ or ‘national’ interests first when one is situated within a finite and unbounded space and attempt the independent construction of desired future situations is a recipe for endless conflict rather than dynamical balance.

An example of how ‘the behaviour of things’ is more complex than ‘what things do’

Given that we are pushing an over-simplified reality in terms of ‘what things do’ far beyond its useful limits, we need to examine how this over-simplified reality model persists ‘in power’ in our society, including as mentioned, how that persistence is achieved via the media, the universities and our belief in ‘science’ (still ‘newtonian’ for the most part). But that is something one can explore and reflect on oneself, after one has the core concept firmly in mind, and it is not easy to hold it firmly in mind because we are continually bombarded with fully popularly accepted accounts of reality in terms of ‘what things do’.

Crowd dynamics provide us with an opportunity to expose the limitations of the ‘what things do’ model of reality.

When we are immersed in a crowd dynamic, we experience its ‘topography’ in terms of islands of stasis, of fast moving channels and slow-moving channels, quiet lagoons etc. and these features of the dynamical landscape shape our movements as individuals and as a collective. These features, meanwhile, are ‘made of’ us who are on the move. They are ‘standing wave patterns’ in the flow of things (people). Moreover, people are continuously coming into the crowd and departing from the crowd so that what we call ‘the crowd’ is not a material structure or ‘group of things’ but a spatial-relational patterning.

The ‘crowd’ in terms of ‘material objects’ could be replaced 100 times over as people move through it even though it may largely arrive at a stable flow-form that will persist, more or less, as people continue to ‘flow through it’. But what is ‘it’ if ‘it’ is not explainable in terms of ‘what things do’? Without burying ourselves in relativity theory, we can say that it is an ‘interference pattern’ that forms NOT from ‘what things do’ but instead from ‘what things do relative to one another and the collective they are included in’. Whenever a group of things ‘start doing stuff’, the influence of space creeps in and they set up an ‘accommodative backpressure’ that reciprocally shapes ‘what they are doing’. This accommodative backpressure is how the common hostspace (that these things are included in) acts as a mediative shaper of ‘what things do’. This is the source of ‘self-organization’ where ‘the things that assert’ and the ‘accommodating backpressure of space’, in assertively pushing into and resistively receiving one another, get into a resonant mode.

Now we can see the approximation that is built into our western default of modeling reality in terms of ‘what things do’. It is a simple model that fails to account for the behaviour-shaping influence of the accommodative spatial backpressure that emerges from ‘what things do’ within a finite and unbounded common space. That is, as the late Stephen Jay Gould persistently reminded us, there can be no assessment of ‘hitting’ (‘what things do’) out of the context of ‘fielding’ (the accommodating, … or disaccommodating, … backpressure of the space we are doing it in) since these two are simply psychologically split apart aspects of a dynamical unity. The islands and channels in the flow of people that shape the flow of people are ‘made of people-flow’ rather than ‘made of people’ (i.e. they are made of immaterial ‘thing-flow’ rather than being materially made of ‘things’).

Of course we can crudely simplify this dual (in a psychological sense) reality by simply imposing the perspective that all of the movement is due to ‘what things do’ and ignore the spatial-shaping of behaviour that is set up by the manner in which things move relative to one another and the overall dynamical collective in which they are included. Certainly if we track each individual as he makes his way ‘through the crowd’ (already an organism-environment-splitting misnomer since ‘he is the crowd he is making his way through’) we can accept that he acted from his individual and independent ‘free will’ and that his behaviour is explainable in terms of newton’s laws etc. (these are simply the abstract foundational assumptions we have built into the ‘what things do’ mental model of reality).

We can say that ‘he chose’ to take the indirect circuitous route around the people-islands and make passage via the fast-moving channel, but ‘in [the larger] reality’ he, and others like him, are co-creating the landscape that is shaping their own and the collective behaviour.

We cannot ‘disconnect’ ‘what the thing does’ from ‘the accommodating spatial back-influence that is shaping his behaviour’. We cannot say ‘he moves through the crowd’ since ‘he is the crowd’ (the ‘collective he’ is the crowd).

Trans-generational crowd dynamics

When people flow through space in a crowd dynamic, the shape of the space they are flowing through is the ‘they’ that are flowing through it. In other words, ‘the space that we are trying to understand is the ‘we’ that are trying to understand it.’ (R.D. Laing in The Politics of Experience discusses how our ‘normality’ is alienating us from ourselves and expresses this same experience-validated reality wherein we relate to the space we are in, in the manner that a hurricane relates to the atmosphere (inclusionally) in the terms; ‘The life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.’

If we acknowledge that we are included in a spatial flow that shapes our behaviour from the outside inwards, as is the case of the group in the cart on their way to the guillotine, and as is the case in general, then we can see that the simplified reality we build in the inside-outward, temporal-sequential terms of ‘what things do’ is an inadequate model for reality. It makes us think that we are each free, as individuals, corporations, nations, … to ‘make things happen’ in the way we want them to, … to ‘build our own individual or corporate or national ‘desired futures’. But in the larger reality, we share a common operating space and as we all simultaneously ‘do our respective make-it-happen thing’ we involuntarily set up an ‘unmanaged’ accommodative backpressure in the form of a topography that shapes our forward-asserting ‘doing’.

Certain individuals can really be ‘squished’ and ‘suffocated’ by spatial disaccommodation and they may react violently. If we hold firmly to our model of reality based solely on ‘what things do’ then we will say that the violent action sprang forth from the inner purpose of the individual and we will hold him fully accountable for his actions. Since a modelled reality based on ‘what things do’ innately lacks the capacity to account for space-based shaping influences on behaviour by way of ‘disaccommodating backpressure’, there is no way, within the model itself, to account for the suffocating experience that sourced the violent ‘doing’. The point here is not that we should put up with the individual or nation that has become violent, it is that the ‘what things do’ pseudo-reality is a ‘causal model’ that invites us to think in the terms that if we eliminate ‘the things that do violence’ then we will eliminate the violence.

The ‘what things do’ model innately lacks the capacity to explain how a group of participants in a shared space can co-create accommodative backpressure that will selectively accommodate the asserting of some and disaccommodate (suffocate) others as they try to actualize their assertive potentials. A judge in the western ‘what things do’ based Justice System has nothing in the model itself by which to ‘accuse’ the community as a whole of selectively disaccommodating some of their own members, so the punishment of a Jean Valjean is left to the intuition of the judge. If he is a ‘fundamentalist’ and believes absolutely in the ‘what things do’ model, which is bound together with the absolutist (mutually exclusive) notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’., ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ etc. then he may ‘show no mercy’, … but more than this, he will not even begin to think in terms of society (the shared hostspace dynamic) being a co-author of the troublesome behaviour since the ‘what things do’ model is founded on the notion that all behaviour comes from the ‘free will’ and ‘inner purpose’ of the ‘thing’. He will think instead of ‘probability’ and ‘luck of the draw’, continuing to see the action of the individual as fully and solely ‘his own’ rather than acknowledging that there can be no assessment of ‘hitting’ (assertive behaviour of the ‘thing’) out of the context of ‘fielding’ (the accommodative backpressure of the hostspace his asserting is included in).

It is not merely over the course of hours that these standing wave flow-patterns can emerge within the flow that shape the flow. Since the principle is clear that these behaviour-shaping spatial accommodation patterns persist without dependence on ‘what particular things do’ (they form out of the way that things move relative to one another and the dynamical flowspace they are included in) there is no reason why their behaviour-shaping form cannot persist longer than the lifetime of individual people. That is, these behaviour-shaping spatial-relationship based flow-patterns can be ‘trans-generational’. Thus a group of men born into the industrial age is like the group of men in the cart on the way to the guillotine and/or a group of men in the crowd flow-dynamic; there is the sense of free-will and of a reality based on what things do (within the cart) but all the while one’s behaviour (or group behaviour) is being shaped by the spatial-relational flowscape one is included in and by one’s movements, helping to sustain the shape of (or to transform the shape of) it.

As physicist-systems thinkers such as Erich Jantsch (The Self-Organizing Universe) have noted, the acknowledging that we are the evolving space we are included in, relieves us of our sense of alienation from the world we live in (the Darwinian notion of the organism locked in combat with his own environment is more of the oversimplified ‘what things do’ model of reality). Since Jantsch goes for the throat of this matter, I include his quote herewith;

"This new picture of science, which is primarily oriented towards models of life, rather than mechanical models, has not only brought about change in science. Thematically and with respect to the kind of knowledge, it is related to those other events that, at the beginning of the last third of our century, have signalled a metafluctuation. The basic themes are the same everywhere. They are summarized in terms like self-determination, self-organization, and self-renewal and in the recognition of a systematic interconnection of all natural dynamics throughout space and time, in the logical primacy of processes over structures, in the role of fluctuations that overrule the law of mass and give the individual and his creative insights a chance, and, finally, in the openness and creativity of an evolution that is predetermined neither in its newly forming and its vanishing structures nor in its end effect. Science is at the point of recognizing these principles as general laws of a natural dynamics. Applied to man and his system of life, they are an expression of natural life in the deepest sense. The dualistic separation of nature and culture is thereby overcome. There is a kind of joy in reaching out, in stepping beyond natural processes --- the joy of life. There is a kind of meaning in life's connection with other processes within an all-encompassing evolution --- the meaning of life. We are not at the mercy of evolution --- we are evolution….." --- Erich Jantsch, 'Die Selbst-Organisation des Universums', 1982).

Why hasn’t this ‘larger reality’ modeling wherein ‘we are evolution’ ‘caught on’?

As mentioned earlier, there is no problem with our personal experience based reality, our family life, our love life, our informal and spontaneous somatic engagement with and within our shared living space, … the problem arises in those activities (social and political organization oriented) where we deliberately seek to construct a model of reality and to use it as a basis for ‘improving it’ so as to construct a ‘better tomorrow’. or ‘the community we dream of’. These time-sequential idealizations are based on the simplified ‘what things do’ model of reality, and they are blind to how we co-creatively cultivate accommodative spatial backpressure that is shaping our behaviour in an over-riding way.

There are many entrenched beliefs in the western psyche that we have to ‘let go of’ in order to let go of the over-simplified ‘what things do’ model and move to the model of reality wherein ‘the space that we are trying to understand is the we that is trying to understand it’. Here’s a shortlist of some of the concepts that have to be superseded in order to open the door to a more natural and consistent-with-experience modeling of reality;

1. The universe is a living universe. The notion that ‘life’ is a recent arrival in the universe ‘has to go’ as does the perceived split between the ‘inanimate realm’ and the ‘animate realm’. That there are more complex ‘things’ (flow-features) in the world is explained by seeing the world as an energy-field-flow (spacetime continuum) within which more complex features upwell through such dynamics as nested inclusion (wherein, for example, prokaryotic micro-organisms sustain a symbiotic group dynamic that is described as a ‘eukaryotic cell’). This sort of organization can be seen in terms of ‘made-of-flow’ spatial relationship rather than in terms of newly evolved ‘independent objects’. ‘Man’ is thus not a ‘more highly evolved thing’ but is an emergent complex flow-form within the thingless connectedness of a relative and quantum wave dynamical naturespace.

2. What we refer to as ‘things’ (independent objects) are flow-features within the thingless-connectedness of the spacetime continuum. No ‘thing’ is an independent object and no thing is solely responsible for its own behaviour (motion is relative), whether such a thing is a human being, a nation, or a corporation. In reality our activities interpermeate within a common relational hostspace dynamic. Attempts to prove ‘causal determinism’ by invoking such logical notions as ‘if I point a gun at your head and pull the trigger and you die, did I not cause your death?’ fail to get by the fact that this is a ‘small reality’ compared to the flow that includes us. The ‘smoking gun’ test can be applied within the cart on the way to the guillotine and while within the cart the ‘what things do’ reality will be confirmed by the same limited ‘logic of mutual exclusion’ by which it has been constructed, it does not address the flow that this laboratory and its experiment is included in. A tsumani that engulfed the courtroom where the gun-crime was being re-enacted would supersede in meaning, this in-the-cart pseudo-proof of ‘what things do’ causal determinism.

3. The evolving space of now is all that our experience can inform us of, all else is abstraction. The only place we live and experience is in ‘the space of now’ (the world of the continuing present). While we talk about ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ as if they were ‘real’, they can never be more than abstractions, idealizations that have been excised from the continuing world of our experience. Insofar as we are captivated by our desire to ‘build a better tomorrow’, to construct ‘the community of our dreams’ or by our tendency to dwell remorsefully or joyously on ‘the past’, we distract ourselves from our participation in the evolving space of now. The point is not to NOT THINK about ‘the past’ and ‘the future’, but is instead to recognize these as abstract concepts that do not equivalence with the ‘natural reality’ of ‘now’. The evolving space we live in contains everything, nature leaves nothing out, the past, present and future are enfolded in the evolving space of now. It is merely a space and time framing convention that has us think in the terms that we have ‘left the historical past behind us’ and that ‘the future is out there ahead of us and is approaching us’. To say that ‘the world has changed’ does not mean that there are old worlds left behind like ghosts, it can mean that space in its entirety is evolving like the infant evolves from ovum to adult.

4. Health, living and dying are to do with ‘dynamical balance’ in an evolving hostspace. The abstraction that we invent and refer to as ‘time’ is rooted in the notion of ‘counting’ perfect cyclic repetitions which cannot occur in the continuously evolving space of nature. In an evolving space, every emergent entity participates via its unique situational inclusion and its persistence derives from sustaining inner-outer dynamical equilibrium. Health and illness are thus NOT an attribute of ‘what things do’ (as in the man-made machine model where ‘health’ = all parts functioning ‘normally’ and ‘illness’ is tautologically defined as = ‘not-health’ or ‘abnormality’) but instead derive from ‘the behaviour of things’ wherein balance is sustained amongst a simultaneous multiplicity of process flows that do not stop at the outer skin of the cell or organism. While the western one-sided, constructivist ‘what things do’ (machine) model yields the notion of temporal aging of ‘the thing’, our natural experience informs us that we are uniquely included participants in the evolution of our hostspace. The local ‘whorl’ that emerges in the flow and visibly participates in its transformation IS the transforming flow and like the hurricane in the atmosphere, always was ‘nonlocal’ in nature (centered locality is always inferred since motion is relative) though our visual perception orients to localized dynamical forms rather than overall spatial-relationships (as contrasted with our felt experience of inclusion). The idea of man/organism as a stand-alone machine that comes out of nowhere, is assessed solely on the basis of ‘what it does’, ages on-its-own towards a future defunct status with the perfect and relentless tick-tocks of absolute time and ultimately ‘stops doing what it does’ and is thrown on the junk pile, … is destructive nonsense that denies our participation in transforming the (energy-flow) space of the continuing present that we and everything are inclusions in.

Summary;

I have been trying to keep this introduction ‘succinct’ and so I shall draw it to a close with a brief summarizing commentary. First, I haven’t mentioned the ‘inclusionality’ sharing circle research that supports the ideas presented in this introduction so as not to complicate an articulation of the basic findings, but there are plenty of references to it on this website (and via the website links given at the foot of this page).

The essential finding is that space (as in energy-field-flow) is the dominating reality and that ‘things’ are secondary flow-features in the manner that the hurricane is a flow-feature of the atmospheric hostspace. It is convenient to speak about the hurricane as if it were a ‘thing’ (e.g. ‘Katrina’) and to shift our reality model to ‘what things do’, … as if the dynamics we see out there in the world ‘really are’ constructed in an inside-outward temporal-sequential fashion that is based on the movements of the centers of the flow-features. While this many be a convenient reduction of our natural reality, a larger reality is that of a transforming flow-space wherein ‘things’ are emergent flow-features that are ‘made of the space they are included in’ (they are essentially ‘nonlocal’ in nature though our visual perception orients to local dynamical form).

This is very hard to ‘hold on to’ for a western acculturated person (I know from experience) though it is what aboriginals and many easterners have no trouble at all in holding on to as the ‘primary’ reality. For the reasons just mentioned, it is difficult for us not to regress to a belief in the ‘smaller reality’ based on ‘what things do’ since it is so ubiquitously built into the structures of our social organization. For example, we teach ‘what things do’ based Darwinian evolution as if it were ‘reality’. For someone who, through their education, has come to believe in ‘Darwinian evolution’ (that ‘things evolve’ rather than ‘co-evolving’ as is the implication when the ‘universe’ is recognized as the primary ‘unit of evolution’) it is hard to supersede it with the notion that ‘the living universe evolves’ though hypotheses such as ‘The Gaia Hypothesis’ move us in this direction, and philosophers such as Erwin Schroedinger (author of ‘quantum wave dynamics) would clearly have it so as well.

As soon as we turn on the television or pick up the newspaper, we are informed, in terse and educated terms uttered by the icons and respected authority figures of our ‘what things do’ western culture, of the goings on in terms of a reality that is ‘what things do’ based. What are we to believe? Our western society is like a community situated within the cart on its way to the guillotine whose constituents are so impressed with their own free-will and independence and wondrously creative constructions that they are fully focused on ‘what they are doing’ to construct the future reality that they want. A preoccupation that occludes their awareness of being in the flow., and without such awareness they cannot assume their natural responsibilities as co-transformers of the flow (their obsession with ‘what things do’ out there in front of them, diverting them from their natural role as co-transformers of the space they are included in; i.e. participants in a ‘crowd dynamic’ have an intuitive awareness that, in their forward asserting they co-evolve the accommodating channels that enable their forward asserting, … they are co-creative shapers of the space they are included in. To forget one’s natural responsibility for co-creating spatial accommodation within a shared hostspace and to instead concentrate solely on ‘getting things done’ is a recipe for non-sustainable growth and the conflict that arises from disaccommodating the less aggressive or less technologically equipped.).

The notion in the news is in the forward constructivist terms that ‘we can make this world a better place’ and this is a dysfunctional notion which can be visualized in terms of the group in the cart denying their inclusion in a hostspace flow that over-rides any of their ‘what things do’ based actions. That is, we are included in the world and it is beyond our powers of forward-driving constructivism to do a ‘make-over’ of the space we are included in. In order to sustain harmony in the world we live in, we must re-store to natural precedence our awareness of inclusion in a common hostspace that has properties of accommodation. We are not in control of this space. Together, we (not just man but the whole inclusionally nested spectrum of flowforms) co-creatively transform the accommodative flowfield we are included in. Our ‘what things do’ hitting/asserting and our spatial-relational fielding/accommodating are two subrealities that we psychologically divide out of the dynamical oneness of nature, the ‘larger reality’ of our natural experience. What we ‘see’ is the hitting and what we ‘feel’ is the fielding, the accommodating quality of the hostspace that mutually shapes the assertive actualization of ‘hitting’. These are two aspects of our holodynamical included-in-space experience which come to us through the sensory cross product of visually perceiving ‘what things do’ and the felt experience of ‘how space accommodates doing’ . Of course we can never know ‘what something would have done’ had the space been fully accommodating to its doing, … nor would we ever be able to visually perceive something that was fully spatially disaccommodated from doing. ‘What things do’ can therefore be neither entirely the property of the thing nor can it be entirely the (accommodating/disaccommodating) property of the space it does it in. All we can perceive is the mutually shaped result, continually emerging in the now, which suggests that ‘what things do’ and ‘how space accommodates’, which give rise to ‘the behaviour of things’ are ‘virtual’ poles of an androgynic dialectic that is resolved by the equivalencing of matter (things) and the energy flow-field; i.e. as with whorls in fluidflow, ‘things are first and foremost spatial-relational forms and are made of the space they are ‘moving through’’

Since we are prone to enslaving ourselves within a trans-generational behavioural flow-pattern by occluding our awareness of even being in it via an intensifying focus on ‘what we need to do’, what has to change is for us to release ourselves and the upcoming generation from what has been persisting indoctrination in the over-simplified ‘what things do’ reality so that our/their natural awareness of inclusion in-the-flow can resurface. How this ‘letting go’ might come about is a topic that invites reflection on our own obsession with controlling behaviours. As Thomas Mann says through the ‘magician’ character in ‘Mario and the Magician’, written during the rise of fascism in Europe in the late 1920’s and 30’s;

“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command.  Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

Think of the organizational power of the mechanical ‘what things do’ goose-stepping variety that accrues by giving ourselves up to a ‘what things do’ way of life. By saying ‘yes sir’ to the boss and by the boss saying ‘yes sir’ to his boss etc. etc., the power of millions that accrues to the One enables the One to walk the earth like a giant, taking whatever he wants and sharing it with his submissive cronies from whom he inherits his inflated ego and this power of synthetic monocultural One-ness. What a sacrifice of natural diversity and authenticity to the cause of ‘constructing the world of your dreams’.

* * *

This completes the introduction to this website, and of course, I have no idea whether what I have written captures what I have intended to share since that depends on what you, the reader, take away from the reading of it. I cannot assess hitting out of the context of fielding, these (transmitting and receiving) are two subrealities that we psychologically divide out of the dynamical oneness of consciousness. If you don’t read this, it is no more than ‘the sound of one hand clapping’ and if you do read it, it cannot ‘inform you’ but can only tease into your awareness what is already there in your felt experience. Such appears to be the nature of holodynamical experience.

mitakuye oyasin,

ted lumley

The ideas presented on this website have benefited from collaboration within a small ‘sharing circle’ of others. Parallel work on the role of space in physical phenomena, termed ‘inclusionality’, seen from a biologist’s, pagan author’s and mathematician’s perspective can be found on the websites of Alan Rayner, Yvonne Aburrow and Lere Shakunle.