Keywords : youth indigenous autochtone relativity euclidian

The Natural Wisdom of Our Indigenous Inquiry Traditions

Since all cultures are ultimately 'indigenous', ... if we can reach back far enough, we can get in touch with our indigenous traditions of perception and inquiry, born of eons of experiential engagement with the enveloping and evolving earth environment. While we of the west, of the european indigenous cultures, have been separated from our indigenous traditions for 2500 years, the autochthonous peoples of North America are still struggling to retain and revive their traditions in an epic 500 year long conflict with their european colonizers. These traditions, our 'more complete' ab-original traditions, embrace the natural primacy of 'space-over-matter', ... of 'volumetric potential field configuration' over 'curvilinear trajectories of kinetic transactions', ... a natural primacy which, if we can restore it, will in turn restore the dynamical equilibria of our spherically nested ecological living space which we have so severely de-stabilized through our ill-advised abandonment of our indigenous traditions.

What we have discarded is the information rich 'complex' perception which starts from the 'shape' of our living, containing space. When the rock rolls down the mountainside, our indigenous ancestor did not see this event in the purely 'kinetic' terms we see it in today, ... he saw it first and foremost in terms of the mountain's space-matter metamorphosis, ... a metamorphosis of his containing landscape wherein the 'kinetic' aspect, ... the simultaneous movement associated with the transformation of his containing landscape, .. was the lesser part. The 'systems inquiry' of what has come to be known as the 'dominator society', has, since the time of Parmenides, emanated from a stark, euclidian, and mathematically 'most simple' vision of environment as 'things-and-empty-rectangular-space' wherein we see 'things' as 'remaining in a state of rest' if we are not 'controlling them' by imposing our will on them. It is this pathologically incomplete perception and inquiry which underlies the progressive infusing of our world with dissonance and dysfunction. That a community of six billion people on the finite and unbounded surface of our earth-sphere, managing multitudes of 'independent' 'realities' of a personal, cultural and commercial nature leveraged by an ever-evolving array of scientific and technological utilities should encounter difficulty through having stopped accounting for self-referentiality (relativity) in their containing landscape of possibility, should not come as a complete surprise.

We have seen the problem and it is 'us'. The most comprehensive of scientific principles of the workings of nature which we have uncovered not only tell us how to be superb builders of technology, ... technology which can be used to 'dominate' our environment in an economic, military and informational sense, ... but principles which tell us about a basic 'conservation' or tradeoff, a 'price' in terms of 'energy' which must always be paid for our 'kinetics'. This is the principle of the conservation of the sum of kinetic and potential energy. When the rock rolls down the mountain, the potential energy configuration manifesting itself in the mountain landscape is changed because the rock 'IS' the mountain landscape at the same time as it is the rock. Now, the 'shape' of the potential energy configuration depends upon spherical space 'inner-outer' relationships of a 'constituent' with its enveloping environmental constituency, ... and this is an innately higher dimensional 'volumetric' type of relationship than is given by the euclidian curvilinear trajectories of material-causal kinetics. While inquiry based solely on kinetics is consistent in itself, it is informationally incomplete because it is no more than a special case subset of the reciprocal outer-inner transformation of the potential field based landscape.

Our indigenous tradition is to orient our perception, inquiry and management to 'our containing landscape of possibility', ... an approach which 'starts from' the continually evolving, pre-shaped holistic 'vessel' for our material-causal kinetics. Like skilled play in the game of billiards, which comprehends the spherical self-referentiality of an enveloping constituency with its constituents, ... the indigenous traditions would have us recognize that by 'managing firstly' on the basis of the geometric configuration of the constituency, ... we are freed from a dependency on the 'specifics of things' and can cultivate whole-and-part harmony amongst a diverse multitude of constituents in such a manner that our 'kinetics' responsibilities emerge as a supportive byproduct. Whereas, by 'managing firstly' on the basis of kinetic movements and interactions amongst the constituents, ... we 'shut out' the information on the potential field landscape and infuse dissonance into the configuration of the constituency. In this complex information-rich 'space-potentials over material-kinetics' orientation of indigenous tradition, ... we not only come back into resonance with natural process and natural experience, ... we come into compliance with the space-matter relational dictates of relativity and quantum theory which we have persistently ignored.

Western inquiry, because it is constrained to material-causal kinetics, can only 'see' dissonance in terms of defective dynamical structures or 'problems' which must be 'eliminated', and this 'problem-and-solution' formulation then becomes the basis for western management and regulatory process. Indigenous inquiry instead sees dissonance in terms of induced, self-referential blockages in the landscape of possibility and seeks to induce forward transformation in the 'shape of the configuration' of a type which will open up opportunity for all constituents, and this forms the basis for indigenous management and regulatory approach. It is a meta-inquiry landscape in which western inquiry is included as a small special-case feature, ... the case where outer-inner self-referentiality of elemental container- constituent subspace units goes to zero.

In the west, the rising incidence of schizophrenia, depression, drug abuse and suicide in the youth sector tends to be interpreted in the material-causal terms of 'defective genetic structure' and public-funded programs are currently underway to 'isolate and purify' the human gene pool. 'Probabilities' are as essential to this constrained western inquiry as 'epicyles' were to earth-centric astronomy, ... to serve as a deus-ex-machina equation-balancing device which 'makes everything fit' and truncates further inquiry. In the west, if one's child develops schizophrenia, it is seen as 'God playing dice' with our genetic structure and the solution is to prescribe drugs which suppress healthy symptom-producing subsystems in order to 'control' the defect. In the indigenous tradition, ... pathologies, rather than being reified by 'diagnosis' as categorical 'defects', are seen in terms of departures from natural dynamical equilibrium and thus the 'healing' challenge is not one of exclusion and elimination, ... but one of restoring to the 'wholeness' of a natural dynamical balance. Modern youth is increasing 'snookered' in possibility space by being caught in the double bind of having to betray his authentic self if he embraces the increasingly 'absurd' social condition, ... or forfeit the love and respect of parents, friends and others if he rebels and rejects such embrace, ... parents, friends and others who may genuinely want him to 'succeed' in life, but who, by feeling impotent with respect to their own ability to change the 'absurd' social condition, impose this impotency on youth.

The geometry of double-bind induced schizophrenia is a generalizable 'systems' geometry in which the constituent is alienated from the containing constituency of which he is simultaneously a part. It is the geometry which would have us see the relativistic 'simultaneous unity and plurality' of curved space, instead, in the unnatural, non-relativistic 'sequential unity and plurality' terms of euclidian flatspace. It stands squarely on our path as 'the problem of our times' and 'the opportunity of our times'.

'God does not play dice' as Einstein said, ... inquiry as to why your child has a drug problem does not have to stop with the notion of probabilities and genetic defects. You can re-embrace your near-forgotten indigenous traditions and instead of interpreting schizophrenic dissonance in the reified terms of 'defective material structures', ... visualize it instead in terms of departures from a natural 'container- constituent- coevolution' [1] or 'dynamical equilibrium'. In this 'amplify the opportunity' oriented rather than 'fix the dissonance' oriented approach, one's first priority mission will NOT be to 'fix' things by 'controlling or eliminating them'; e.g. by controlling 'schizophrenia' with radical drugs, abortion programs and penal institutions, ... but instead, by seeing emergent dissonance in terms of natural healing energy, ... as natural rebellion against a system out of balance, ... and responding by unblocking the constipated possibility space which is inducing the dissonance. Managing with an orientation towards providing accessibility to all constituents in the shared commons of space-time, with their unique 'need- and- possibility' based realities, gives them the space to focus their energies on becoming who they were meant to become, rather than on de-bottlenecking their possibility space.

The concept of 'probability' is the synthetic device by which western inquiry 'discretizes' the continuous 'possibility space' of the potential field configuration, breaking it down into a number of 'choices' in the form of discrete material-causal kinetic transactions, ... only one of which will be 'chosen' to become 'actual', ... the choosing being attributed to some agency 'outside' of the system space, ... to 'God playing dice'. In the game of pool, western inquiry would typically present the game in terms of how it 'presents' to the player, a number of alternative kinetic transactions and their associated probabilities which he must 'choose from'. In this manner, space-time is split apart into 'things in their own right' and 'linear time' and re-constructed in terms of series of kinetic transactions. But this approach arbitrarily and anthropocentrically 'glorifies' the human player's role while ignoring the fact that nature is also playing in the game via the potential field configuration which pre-determines the landscape of kinetic possibility and which reciprocally transforms with any and all material movement.

By contrast, neither the inquiry of indigenous tradition, the theory of relativity nor the skilled pool player recognize any need to conceptualize the game in terms of discrete transactions and probabilities, apart from the expedient of linguistic description. These 'upstream' and more complete inquiry approaches see the game in the volumetric terms of cultivating configurational opportunity (possibility space) for the constituents so that the constituents can flow unhindered towards their respective purpose.

In relativistic, indigenous inquiry, the reference frame is the potential field configuration, ... the containing space of 'possibility', ... the dynamical equilibrium formed by a multitude of constituents in apparent stasis due to their mutually interfering multi-reality pursuit of 'field based purpose', ... rather than the inertial euclidian reference framing arbitrarily imposed by the observer to fit his personal reality. There is no splitting apart of space and time in indigenous inquiry, and there is no making out as if the player is in control. In indigenous inquiry, the player is seen to make his moves relative to the flowing, evolving reference frame of the potential field configuration. As Henri Laborit suggest in 'La Nouvelle Grille' (The New Paradigm), the relativistic player is like the sailor caught in a storm who pulls up his rudder, takes down his mainsail, abandons his absolutist euclidian plans and controls, and uses his jib to guide his movements RELATIVE TO the prevailing currents and winds in which he is immersed. Thus, for sailor, pool player and indigenous inquiry in general, the continuous flowing of nature, which includes the observer's own co-perturbing of his containing space, becomes the multi-reality reference base for his actions, and the abstract, absolutist notions of discrete transactions and discrete choice are exposed for what they are, ... synthetic abstractions of convenience which ignore the reciprocal, induced transformation of the containing potential field configuration, the 'possibility space' which shapes and precipitates actuality.

The self-delusion of absolute 'choice' and discrete, alternative kinetic transactions which comes bundled into our aberrant 'matter-over-space' primacy of western inquiry is a plague of our own making. It is a cultural pathology which will dissipate in our re-embrace of the 'space-over-matter' primacy which is at the heart of the inquiry tradition of our indigenous forebears.

Complexification Induced by Non-Relativistic Western Systems Inquiry Tradition

From continuing dialogue, in one fashion or another, with the 'sciences' and the 'systems sciences', ... the visualization of where the sciences 'are coming from' has, for me, clarified considerably. It is easy to forget that the sciences have historically avoided the nonlinear systems aspects of natural phenomenal, .... the very essence of natural phenomena, ... and have instead focused on extending scientific knowledge 'linearly' by a deeper 'mining' of scientific subspaces; i.e. the sciences have sought to improve their understanding of the way the world works by 'focusing on themselves'. In this narcissist undertaking, ... an undertaking sustained by social recognition for scientific achievement in its own right, ... the scientist and/or 'systems scientist' generates knowledge which can be used in many different ways, ... and IS, IN FACT, used in many different ways.

According to the systems sciences, to understand complexity we must account for "the system as a whole, which we, at the same time consider as part of, and embedded in, its containing environment", thus to 'understand the sciences', we must understand, not only 'what they do', but also, and at the same time, the transformation they induce in their containing environment. As a direct consequence of the possibility- enriching 'knowledge creation' aspect of the sciences, the world becomes more complex and an understanding of 'the way the world works', by the individual immersed within it tends to lag. In order to 'navigate' in a world which is made increasingly complex by science and technology, the individual must develop and maintain some measure of current understanding of science and technology and the transformation it is inducing in his containing 'system' landscape.

This scientific-technologic educational burden is well evident today in the domain of personal computers, networked communications and in most facets of modern life, and has become an un-asked for 'fact of life' for every individual, every community and every nation. Knowledge acquisition overheads have become so large that they have become a fundamental animator of everyday life at all organizational levels, from the individual to company and nation, and are auto-intensifying in a manner that no-one seems to control. More education in science and technology leads to more scientists and technologists and to more scientific and technologic knowledge and to more commercial implementations, ... and so the science and technology- induced transformation of our containing 'system landscape' spirals on exponentially.

To be sure, science and technology can also indemnify and shelter the individual from having to 'know' what is going on around him, ... and he is thus becoming more and more dependent on things he doesn't understand and cannot himself produce or sustain. Not only individuals but nations have been developing dependencies upon science and technology- based products and processes which they do not themselves understand and themselves produce and sustain. And, ...as individuals and nations with growing arrays of dependencies they 'do- not- understand- and- cannot- themselves- produce- and- sustain' become part of the overall 'system' of the way the world works, this means that no-one can possibly 'understand' the system in a rational sense because it is no longer a 'rational' system but is instead, and to a large degree, a system of dependencies and addictions animated not by 'purpose', as per superficial appearances, but more importantly, by fear of the withdrawal of goods and services for which dependencies have evolved. The imagery is one of an intensifying race to satisfy continuously broadening and deepening science-and-technology induced dependencies which are less and less understood by the individual person or nation.

Science and rationality, therefore, by an UNBALANCED focusing on the exploitation of scientific subspaces which leads to commercial implementations, ...is cultivating non-rational systems behaviors in the overall system it is immersed in. I use the term UNBALANCED, rather than a judgemental term emanating from bivalent (euclidian) 'systems' frameworks (e.g. good or bad, better or worse etc.) since science has the potential to go beyond the 'bivalent' 'improving' of our knowledge of 'how systems work' within particular subspaces, to deal with the larger issue of how our scientific inquiry induces transformation in the multivalent, multi-reality of our containing environment, ... a whole new way of (scientifically) perceiving, inquiring and responding to the way the world works. It is the way of the 'immersed scientific observer' rather than the way of the scientific 'voyeur'. I am speaking here, of the nonlinear, curved space perceptive mode wherein the observer cultivates an ability to sense how his flatspace material-causal actions, ... i.e. his 'scientific- voyeurism based actions' simultaneously transform the landscape of possibility in which he is an immersed constituent- participant.

Alternative, 'Englobing' (Spherically Nested) Geometries of Systems Inquiry

This 'immersed' inquiry is the 'way' of natural systems and it is the way of 'exceptional teams', the indigenous peoples' traditions, Zen and Taoism. It is the 'simultaneous unity and plurality' based 'way' of Heraclitus, Lao Tsu, Gotama Buddha and the 'Zero Chiefs', and it is the 'way' of the general theory of relativity. It is a mode of perception, inquiry and response, wherein every material-causal 'event' or 'movement' is seen as having a reciprocal effect on the potential energy configuration or 'possibility space' of its containing environment. Immersed inquiry goes beyond 'kinetics' and comprehends the 'multi-reality' nature of our containing environment, ... each rock, sandgrain, plant, animal, drop of water finding itself immersed in a tensioned, potential field and 'wanting to go somewhere', ... but being blocked by others wanting to go elsewhere. To the degree that we can tap into the multi-tensioned potential field configuration, ... the 'collective conscious' of our multi-reality containing environment, ... and move in harmony with it, ... we can feel joy and love. That is the personal experiencing which is spoken of in the context with 'being in the Tao'.

The Tao, and relativity theory, both deal with the pure potential energy configuration of space-time, ... the 'possibility space' which precedes the 'actuality space' of kinetics. "The Tao is the pattern of things but not the enforced law. Thus we read in the Han Fei Tzu book (early -3rd century)" [2]

The physics is clear, ... an understanding of the potential field configuration, ... where every constituent of space 'wants to go', what is 'blocking them', and what opportunities they currently have, constitutes an implicit, continuously evolving, 'possibility space' informational presence, which is 'bigger than' the explicit, informational flow associated with material-causal kinetics. In fact, all kinetics are 'born' out of this multi-tensioned potential field 'possibility space' and all kinetics simultaneously transform it, ... the sum of kinetic and potential energy remaining constant. The 'rub' is, that if we want to do our systems inquiry in terms of kinetics, ... we need a consistent, euclidian, observational reference frame in order to describe movement (velocity) and kinetic energy transactions. And when 'we' assume a consistent observational reference frame, we are in effect 'constructing a single reality'. And the 'we' in this prior sentence is whoever is doing the systems inquiry, ... an individual, a company, a culture, a nation, a global consortium, ... etc. But from a potential field configuration point of view, ... each constituent has 'different needs' which are intrinsically interwoven with 'place', ... the unique and continually 'opening-and-closing' configuration of blocked- off and open channels of possibility which each constituent 'sees', ... and each constituent perspective therefore 'needs' a different euclidian reference frame which centers around his needs and movements, ... and this simple experiential fact gives rise to the notion that our containing environment is composed of a 'multi-reality' constituency.

Mathematically, the view of possibility space in terms of each unique 'point' constituting a 'place-based reality' with an associated potential field based configuration of need-and-possibility, leads to the notion that each 'point' in space is not a 'point' at all, but is instead, ... a spherical , etherial, 'zero' which embodies the potential-energy --- kinetic energy reciprocal ordering principle. This 'conservation of energy' principle, which holds true for all natural phenomena, demands an inner-outer volumetric treatment of space, as opposed to the flatspace curvilinear treatment of kinetics based observations. A review of the inner-outer volumetric nature of energy conservation, and the reciprocal relationship between flatspace curvilinear 'material-causal kinetics' and curved space 'induced potential field transformation', is very clearly presented in a web-essay by Claerbout and Dellinger [3] in connection with the resolving of an apparent energy paradox associated with source-receiver receiprocity in seismology.

The 'synthetic' nature of the notion of 'things travelling at a given velocity' is demonstrated by the fact that when two visible waves 'travelling in opposite directions' meet, ...we see them as 'adding up', in which case their energy, which is proportion to the square of their amplitude, would seem to be four times as much rather than double which is in violation of conservation of energy, ... and when two such waves have opposite polarity (a 'peak' versus a 'trough'), we seem as 'going to zero' (cancelling each other out) which is also in violation of conservation of energy. As Claerbout and Dellinger point out, ... there is no violation if we consider that the sum of potential and kinetic energy is conserved, since the non-manifest pressure wave goes to zero in the first case and doubles in the second case. While the authors retain the theoretical dependency on the notion of a 'velocity wave in its own right', they acknowledge that space behaves as if each point in space is innately 'spherical' (i.e. that space is not a space whose basic essence is a simplistic 'yang' 'something', .. but whose essence is, instead, an inductive 'yin' field potential). The primacy of the invisible, volumetric 'yin field' over the manifest 'yang structure' in this example, and in nature in general, suggests, in agreement with relativity, that material causal kinetics are a secondary, abstracted feature of our containing natural environment.

While the abstract notion of the INDEPENDENCE of 'single waves' raises its bizarre head as Claerbout and Dellinger's talk about 'adding together multiple waves coming from the same direction', they 'let sleeping dogs lie', ... but this is precisely the point where Denis Gabor (Nobel laureate for discovery of holography) did not. Gabor pointed out in his quantum physics compliant 'Theory of Communications' [4], in yet another way, how information in nature is, in its essence, outer-inner volume based (i.e. 'yin field potential' based). In this classic paper, cited by Bart Kosko in 'Fuzzy Thinking' in the context of its 'included middle' implications, ... the concepts of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the notion of the basic volumetric origin of information come together, ... and lead to the notion of information not in terms of bivalent 'true or false', 'thing or no-thing' representation, but in terms of space-matter self-referentiality, ... the 'shape of space', ... the 'inductive potential' which resides within each elemental unit of space, ... the same 'complex analytical signal' which Claerbout and Dellinger find essential in explaining seismic wave phenomena, ... which gives each elemental unit its own unique 'reality' with respect to its containing whole.

Now in this multi-reality based containing environment, there is a basic incompleteness in using a euclidian reference frame and working with kinetics. That is, ... while the observer can capture all the motion of all the constituents and deduce his own, ... there is a 'blind spot' around his 'vantage point' and he cannot 'see' the pattern of 'blocking' which he contributes to the potential field configuration, aka 'possibility space'. This simple, experience-based fact makes all euclidian perspectives 'incomplete' (non-relativistic), and it means that the larger and more constraining the vantage point, ... the more conflict there will be between 'single reality' perspective and the multi-reality purpose. Statistical norms, compromise, political correctness, interminable and intolerant debating and 'the tyranny of the majority' are all fallout from this incompleteness in western, single-reality based systems perception, inquiry, management and regulatory approach.

When we inquire into systems in a dual-aspect, reciprocally coupled 'way' (wherein kinetic actuality derives from, and induces transformation in possibility), the suggestion emerges that material-causal transactions, rather than being 'primary', are the artifacts of the continuing evolution of space-time potential energy configurations (i.e. 'field'). Since we, ourselves, are part of the evolutionary flow-field, and since the constituents of the overall constituency can, relativistically, only be referenced to themselves, ... removing the observer from the inquiry renders such inquiry innately incomplete. Or, in other words, using non-relativistic euclidian reference framing ('matter-over-space' framing) unavoidably 'blanks out' the potential field blocking effects of those 'things' associated with the observer vantage point which are assumed to be 'static' (norms, standards etc.)

To use the metaphor of pool, which emulates curved space, to describe the relationship between the dual potential field possibility space - kinetic actuality space, ... the movement of any ball SIMULTANEOUSLY changes the possibilities for kinetic action 'seen' by all balls. Thus, by analogy, when we, the observer, remove ourselves from our observations, we distort the representation of the 'possibility landscape' (potential field configuration) as experienced collectively and individually by the other constituents, ... a possibility landscape which 'gates' which material-causal kinetics can become actuality. That is, in 'euclidian' or 'voyeur' inquiry, the 'five-ball's account of the game' will say things like, 'I couldn't get to the seven-ball because the 'three-ball' was in the way, ... and the three-ball's account of the game will say things like, 'I couldn't get to the two-ball because the seven-ball was blocking my path'. But what the 'observer' is 'blocking', ... or more precisely, ... what 'the observing element of the ensemble' is 'closing down' in 'possibility space', relative to the pursuits of other constituents of the containing constituency will be 'excluded' in this voyeur representation, ... the standard representation mode of mainstream science and systems inquiry.

The general principle here is that perception based on kinetic actuality, ... the standard perception in mainstream science and systems inquiry, ... is an incomplete, 'single- reality' perspective which fails to include the over-riding influence of the multi-reality possibility space, or 'potential field configuration' essential to an understanding of 'the way the world works'. Phenomenal representation built upon an observer's view of kinetics, even if it includes him in the picture, is fundamentally 'incomplete' because it does not speak to those unborn kinetic actualities (possibilities) which could not immerge because of the observer's presence in the interference configuration. The outcome of a motorcycle race will depend not only on kinetics but also on interference effects, ... who was blocking whom from overtaking during the race. The same 'blocking' oriented perspective can be said with respect to sand-grains and rocks lodged on the side of the mountain slope.

Reflection on this potential field based 'reciprocal' 'blocking' way of looking at things soon informs us that the 'mountain as constituted by a configuration of interferential blocking', ... a multi-constituent network of codynamical equilibria, ... is a 'bigger story' than the story of the rock which rolls down the mountain slope (simultaneously transforming the shape of its mountain-container and its potential field configuration). The bigger view is of the potential energy configuration, ... the relativistic blocking configuration, and this is a view of multi-reality possibility wherein every 'thing' wants to 'go somewhere' if only some other 'thing' would quit interfering and move out of the way! Kinetic actuality is a secondary story of the shifting and shuffling which goes on when something does 'get out of the way'. When the observer describes kinetic actuality in euclidian space terms, he omits his own 'blocking role' which is continually influencing, in a whole-and-part interference manner, ... which kinetics actually occur. For systems inquiry to be 'comprehensive' in reflecting our experience, then, ... it must employ 'immersed perception' and view single-reality 'kinetics' as an included feature within the larger, 'possibility space' landscape of a multi-reality potential field equilibria.

The 'immersed' mode of inquiry is consistent with our basic 'volumetric' 'outer-inner' experiencing which is of a multivalent (multi-azimuthal interference) 'thrust-and-parry' nature as described by Henri Poincaré in 'The relativity of space' [5], ... experience which we abstractly 'reduce', with the use of the simplistic euclidian space convention, to the 'voyeur' notion of a bivalent, forward-or-backward kinetics of material 'things' on curvilinear trajectories. The 'immersed' volumetric experience is a more comprehensive and higher dimensional perceptive mode which 'englobes' the 'voyeur' mode as a broad landscape (implicit relational interference pattern) englobes one of its explicit physical feature. This 'inclusionary' spherical nesting relationship found in nature (molecule is englobed by cell which is englobed by organism which is englobed by community which is englobed by environment) is also found in the domain of evolving scientific theory, as Einstein and Infeld [6] point out in the context of 'field' based theory versus 'matter' based theory;

"To use a comparison, we could say that creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles of our adventurous way up."

In relativistic terms, this hierarchical 'primacy' of 'field' over material- kinetics is not given in the ontological- chronological terms of non-relativistic euclidian space, ... but in the ecologically hierarchical terms of the geometrical 'shape' of space-time seen as an energy-ordering substance (aka 'field'). As in the simple model of the game of pool, which emulates curved space-time, ... the elemental movement- induced transformation of the 'possibility space' represented by the 'shape' of the configuration, ... a possibility space which pre-determines which material-causal actualities can occur, ... represents a higher dimensional 'superspace' of possibilities within which, 'material-causal actuality', is a secondary, contained 'subspace'. As Einstein has shown, ... the curved space-time superspace of relativity CONTAINS the flat euclidian and sequential time subspace in the same, inclusionary sense that a broad landscape contains a particular feature. BOTH the englobing landscape and the feature are 'true' at the same time, ... a condition of 'simultaneous unity and plurality' which demands the logic of 'the law of the included middle'. In reviewing current perspectives on inclusionary logic in transdisciplinary science, Seb Henagulph comments [2] ;

"Stéphane Lupasco in the 1940s, through contact with quantum physicist Louis de Broglie developed what he called "le principe d'antagonisme", which is a logic of reciprocal contradiction and complementarity. His ideas are currently undergoing a revival in France, where several of his works have been re-released. His theory formalizes the 'logic of the included middle' and allows for a complete integration of the different levels of Reality, both on the side of the subject and that of the object. Basarab Nicolescu in Gödelian Aspects of Nature and Knowledge says of the logic of the included middle:

"History will credit Stéphane Lupasco with having shown that the logic of the included middle is a true logic, formalizable and formalized, multivalent (with three values: A, non-A, and T) and non-contradictory. Our understanding of the axiom of the included middle -- there exists a third term T which is at the same time A and non-A -- is completely clarified once the notion of 'levels of Reality' is introduced." . . . "The logic of the included middle is perhaps the privileged logic of complexity, privileged in the sense that it allows us to cross the different areas of knowledge in a coherent way, by enabling a new kind of simplicity." "

This relativistic, curved-space 'immersed scientific observer' mode of systems inquiry, characterized by its use of the logic of the included middle, follows from 'common sense' as opposed to the over-simplified abstractions of euclidian space and linear time. As Einstein also said; "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."

The skilled pool player knows that the kinetics of the game, ... the 'material-causal transactions', ... do not 'come out of the blue', but emerge from the relational interference or 'potential field configuration' of the containing constituency within which they occur, and that he must put the management of this englobing 'possibility space' in the primacy over the management of the kinetics which occur within it. If not, the induced reciprocal transformation of possibility space, ... the 'flip side' of the kinetics he is imposing on the system, will tend to 'close down' ('snooker') the possibility of transactions favorable to his continuing purpose. This involuntary 'snookering' or 'sowing of dissonance' into the possibility space, contrasts with the 'opening up' of possibilities catalyzeable by his direct management of 'possibility space'.

Mainstream science and systems science seem as if they 'do not want to know' about the reciprocal transformation induced by material-causal kinetics, ... nor assume the responsibility of their own reciprocal transformational impact and neither does the individual acculturated in the western 'dominator society'. This 'not wanting to know', according to David Bohm ('Thought as a System'), comes from our 'feelings', culturally cultivated feeling and thinking patterns which may be painful or pleasurable. The avoidance of painful thoughts, ... such as a traditional scientist feels when he opens the door to the messiness of deterministic chaos or relativity, ... multivalent interference effects whose 'management' engages intellection muscles which he has allowed to atrophy, ... and which have difficulty 'rising to the occasion'. As Bohm says, when one's persistence in a given manner of thinking is due to the avoidance of unpleasant results, this leads to 'sustained incoherence' ---"incoherence --- you want to do something but it doesn't come out the way you intend.". What comes out instead, is dissonance and dysfunction. The 'rather fight than switch' character of religious wars testifies to the strength of this biological feelings basis of human behavior, ... and it is no different for non-religious westerners, of whom it often said, "worship at the altar of science and rationality", ... a bivalent, non-relativistic altar, to be sure.

'Upgrading' to the management of possibility space (potential field interference patterns) rather than basing one's 'primary' management approach on material-causal transactions, does not alter anything with respect to the theory and applications of the 'actuality subspace' of material-causality, ... it simply 'lifts up' the systems' perception, inquiry and management focus to the broader possibility landscape or 'shape of space' view within which the material-causal 'shot-making' view is a smaller, contained feature. This 'immersed scientific observer' mode of systems inquiry is not only practiced by skilled pool players, ... it is practiced within exceptional teams and within those indigenous peoples' communities which continue to embrace their ancestral traditions.

Accounting for the 'reciprocity' or 'circularity' in systems processes 'makes sense' from our experiencing of natural phenomena. If we see a rock roll down the mountainside, our systems inquiry is fundamentally incomplete if it is constrained to material-causal kinetics 'in their own right'. Our common sense tells us what our western analytical mode of systems inquiry is blind to, ... i.e. the rock was able to roll down the mountain because the potential field configuration in which it was contained presented it with that possibility, ... and as it moved, it simultaneously changed its containing potential field configuration or 'possibility space' and thus its motion inductively changed the 'possibilities' available to itself and to all other constituents of the space, ... and that includes and connects it with us, the observer. These possibilities, unique to each constituent, effectively constitute multiple realities, ... the fallen rock in its reality blocks the stream and shrinks the stream channel flowing in its reality which then floods the village and the anthill and interferes with their realities. It would take an omniscient observer to comprehend relativistic, induced transformational effects of material-causal kinetics, and this is a 'painful thought' for a people who like to think they 'know what they're doing', ... thus there is massive denial leading to 'sustained incoherence'.

On an evolutionary scale, inquiry into material-causal kinetics, no matter how exhaustive and how detailed, if it does not account for the reciprocal disposition effects of relativistic curved space-time (possibility space effects) will not inform us as to the fact, for example, ... that with every movement of rock and sandgrain, the mountain landscape is being reduced to a swamp or desert plane. Since we 'live within' the systems landscapes we are inquiring into, and since our own kinetics are inducing transformation of our containing landscape, this would seem to be an important aspect of systems inquiry. In fact, exceptional teams recognize this point, that systems have a potential field configuration as in the game of pool, ... a possibility space configuration which pre-determines which material-causal transactions can emerge, ... and that one must manage this possibility space on a first priority basis, ... allowing the kinetic aspects to fall in place on a secondary basis.

This 'space-over-matter' inquiry, while more complete, lacks the explicit precision of the materialist 'matter-over-space' inquiry --- an explicit precision which is due to our preference for systems inquiry based upon 'the exact solution to an approximate problem', rather than 'an approximate solution to the actual problem'. The skilled pool player who manages 'shape-over-shots' can only imply, rather than explicitly state, what he is doing, since our bivalent language (a language of reified things and causal kinetics) cannot directly accommodate multivalent interference effects, ... the shifting and transforming patterns of unbounded dynamical equilibria, whose descriptive requirements are implicit and transcend the capability of 'thing-based' description (i.e. mathematically, the shape of the area external to multiple bounded areas on the surface of a sphere [i.e. in curved space] has no bounds and thus cannot be described except in the 'implicit' terms of the patterns of interference of the bounded areas).

The Comparative 'Sociology' of 'Managing Kinetics' and 'Managing Opportunity'

In the west, one is culturally conditioned to derive pleasure from the thought of referencing one's understanding of things to explicit laws, contracts and agreements, and 'managing' one's life and affairs on this basis. Correspondingly, one is uncomfortable with the 'space-over-matter' implications of relativity which demand management based on 'trust' since inquiry and response then depends on 'immersed observer' perception which cannot be explicitly specified. This point is made by Francis Fukuyama ('Trust') with respect to the 'keiretsu' or trust-based networks of the Japanese culture which eschew formalized contracts, versus the 'explicit contract in place of trust' western preference.

Systems which are based on explicit specifications, in effect, 'wallpaper over' the reciprocally induced transformational effects innate in nature, and management which is based on explicit specifications is like managing a game of pool solely on the basis of 'shots'. That is, there is no consideration, in the management allocation of respect, reward and access to resources, associated with the cultivation of possibility for the 'other realities' which are players in the game. In fact, many westerners, because of their 'bivalent', excluded-middle logical upbringing, believe that their IS only 'one reality' and it is no other than the one which they have constructed.

Interviews with skilled pool players indicate that in the game of 'Scotch Doubles' where the two players per team take their turns in succession (rather than interspersing their turns with the opposing team members), the harmonic cooperation which comes from putting the cultivation of 'shape' (possibility or opportunity) for one's partner and for the continuously evolving multi-reality game, in the primacy over exploiting one's own shots, .... at the same time as one is making one's shots, ... is a source of considerable pleasure. In systems inquiry and management approaches which 'see' only material-causal kinetics and are 'blind' to the reciprocal induced transformation of 'possibility space', however, opportunity cultivation for other participating 'realities' is at the discretion of the individual. And it is our common experience that while some individuals, in the process of making their 'shots', cultivate 'shape' for others, ... some individuals 'strip-mine' the opportunities to satisfy the needs of their own reality and in the process, infuse dissonance and dysfunction into our multi-reality containing environment.

In western system inquiry, then, 'nature's ethic' of 'cultivating opportunity for other realities (including animals, plants and the 'land') at the same time as we 'act' on our own behalf is left 'flapping in the breeze' as we hustle to satisfy the needs of our own realities (individual, community, culture, nation etc.). This management focus on 'kinetics', wherein what is 'moving' and what is 'excluded' is tailored to the needs of our personal reality, ... effectively 'excludes' consideration of the opportunity needs of other realities which nevertheless 'interfere with' and are effected by the kinetics within our reality; i.e. the motionless, zero kinetic energy state of the baseball bat we are managing is not seen in the same way by the pedestrian who gets whopped as the speeding car whose window we are holding the bat out of passes him by. To say that is not our intention to trample over and confuse the ordering in other realities does not help in subsuming the dissonance within a multi-reality whole-and-part dynamical equilibrium. Instead, a conscious admission of the incompleteness of rational intellection and its progeny, 'managing by material-causal kinetics', is required to transcend this dysfunction.

Globalization and Specialization: The Amplification of Dissonance

Something more is going on in our non-relativistic science and rationality dominated community, however, and this 'something more' is 'globalization'. The implicit (non-explicitly specifiable) patterns of opportunity cultivation (i.e. 'possibility cultivation') which have been left 'flapping in the breeze' are, like everything else, being 'globalized' on the backbone grid of linear science and rationality. Now we have global scale patterns of, on the one hand, kinetics associated with 'strip-mining' which destroys opportunity on a diverse multi-reality basis, and on the other hand, kinetics which cultivate opportunity.

At the same time, science and technology is becoming more and specialized and products formed by the integration of its elements more complex. Seb Henagulph, in his essay 'Three Pillars of Transdisciplinarity' [2] reviews this rising 'tower of Babel' effect; "A recent editorial in Nature Neuroscience speaks of the growing problem of experts who are no longer able to understand one another: "In Darwin's time, it was possible to write a book that was both a primary scientific report and a popular bestseller. Today, however, that seems like a remote ideal. Not only is it difficult to communicate scientific ideas to the general public, but scientists seem to have increasing difficulty communicating with each other. Even within biology, researchers in different areas of specialization are often unable to understand each other's papers."

The 'Liquid Kinetics' of Money and its Breeding of 'ASIDS'

While the individual and the nation is becoming more and more dependent on the products and processes of science and technology, and as these products and processes breed, multiply and complexify, the system itself becomes less and less rational. That is, while individuals and nations no longer understand how, themselves, to produce and sustain the products and services they depend upon, ... their system response is to safeguard their access to them; i.e. it is the same type of non-rational system response as an addict has with respect to a drug, ... motivated by the avoidance of withdrawal. Since the 'currency' in this irrational, out-of-control system is to 'make more' of the same, ... and since an understanding of the 'possibility space' interference patterns of the multiple realities involved decline in proportion to the effort we put into optimizing our single realities, ... an ever-intensifying circle of effort is induced, on the part of a particular reality (individual, community, nation) to 'make more' so as to stave off supply severance, ... an effort which, in the face of declining understanding of the possibility space pattern, leads to 'strip-mining kinetics' which satisfy the needs of one's local reality out of the context of interference induced in the multi-reality whole.

Commensurately, the 'natural ethic' and 'natural ability' of cultivating multi-reality opportunity simultaneous with one's 'kinetics' falls by the wayside, ... a situation which progressively breeds an 'Acquired Systems Inquiry Deficiency Syndrome' (ASIDS) pathology on the part of individuals and organizations, ... the 'run-away' evolution of a system towards pure kinetics and zero potential energy, ... everything moving 'in step' with no balanced oppositional potentials for storing energy to sustain the supply of 'opportunity' in the system, .... as if the mountain suddenly turns into frictionless mud and flattens into a global mud-pie. Money therefore has the tendency to act as 'liquid kinetics' and to atrophy our natural ability to 'manage opportunity' in a multi-reality environment. One can think of this in terms of the pool metaphor; i.e. in multi-reality team play, one must cultivate opportunity for one another within the containing space in order to sustain the play, ... but if one is given 'money' for one's 'kinetics' (successful 'shots'), this tends to short-circuit cooperative cultivation of opportunity.

Taking into account the reciprocal, induced transformation effects of relativity inherent in nature and in our common-sense experience, however, leads to management oriented to the cultivation of possibility, a far broader landscape in which 'kinetics' is a small, contained (reciprocal) feature. The management of opportunity does not depend on explicit specifics, because it does not depend on 'things' and their causal transactions (kinetics). Instead, it depends upon the unbounded 'shape of space'. There are still some sparks of this type of this natural 'space-over-matter' management amongst the dying embers in the western culture, ... one example is where we 'make space' for our children to develop according to their natural intuition, rather than pressuring them to 'betray their natural authenticity' and prep for zombie-ization and consumption in the machinery of global economics. We do not explicitly specify what they must do, ... but instead give them sheltered space from the huge pressures imposed by the globalizing scientific industrial-financial complex and help them to gain access to the gifts of the earth which are intuitively important to them in their own unique constituent ontogeny, in a container-constituent coevolutionary sense. Such sheltering becomes less and less possible and pervasive as the ASIDS pathology intensifies and globalizes.

The 'Natural Ethic' of Opportunity Management

In short, the 'natural ethic' of 'managing the shape of space' is a broader, englobing multi-reality systems inquiry approach which contains (includes) the 'abstract and unnatural ethic' of 'managing material-causal kinetics' in the manner that a broad landscape contains and includes a particular and explicit physical feature; i.e. in the same manner that a 'dunescape' contains and includes a particular and explicit grain of sand. The dissonance and dysfunction in our society is ultimately 'felt' and 'measured' in terms of the clash of multiple realities as the opportunities are 'closed down' for one reality by the 'opening up' of opportunities for other realities. It is no more than (natural) common sense to start with the goal of cultivating harmony amongst the multiple realities in nature by relativistically 'managing the shape of space', ... the 'possibility space' as seen by a diversity of realities, ... in the manner of the skilled pool player who cultivates the 'shape' of the configuration 'as seen by' the diversity of balls, each of which is 'centered' within its own unique reality or 'possibility space' given by relativistic 'reciprocal disposition'.

In this manner, the 'immersed observer', space-over-matter oriented approach to systems inquiry and response leads to an 'ecological' management practice based on 'opening up opportunity' for the multiple constituents in the containing space. Advocacy of this management practice is apparent amongst indigenous traditionalists, as for example, in Taiaiake Alfred's 'Peace, Power and Righteousness: an indigenous manifesto', wherein he cites in his conclusions; "Most urgently, we must begin to 're-create a space of honour and respect within our societies for young people'. And in Paula Underwood's 'And Who Shall Speak for Wolf', we see, further, that this 'management of opportunity' is a natural management approach which opens itself up to consideration of the multiple realities of all of the constituents in our environment.

The resurgence of the indigenous traditions, in general, seeks to give to youth, and to all who make up our containing environment, the 'sacred space to become that which they are meant to become', rather than to be involuntarily manipulated by a material-causal kinetics oriented management, a poor pool players way of 'playing the game' which neglects the induced transformation in his containing landscape inextricably and reciprocally tied to his 'actions'.

Seen in the context of this multi-reality 'immersed-inquiry' and 'possibility-space- management' which inclusively 'englobes' single reality 'voyeur-inquiry' and 'actuality- space- management', ... the individual scientist or discipline, as he 'mines' a particular scientific subspace and delivers usable knowledge to the host community in which he/it is immersed, can at the same time open up his consciousness to the reciprocal induced transformation in the 'potential field configuration' or 'possibility space' of his containing environment, ... a possibility space wherein the accessibility to resources (potential energy convertible to kinetic energy) 'gates' which actualities can emerge, ... a possibility space which is the mother of material-causal 'kinetics'.

This 'opening up' of consciousness is achieved through dialogueing across multiple realities, as in the 'sharing circles' of indigenous tradition, ... trusting in the perspectives of those occupying other realities so that the relativistic 'shape of space', the implicit, multi-reality interference pattern, is brought into connection in the mind. Equipped with this broader landscape of possibility understanding, and an implicit understanding of how the kinetics in one's own reality 'interferes' with the 'opportunity landscape' seen by multiple other realities, ... one is in a position to manage the kinetics of one's own reality in such a manner as simultaneously cultivates opportunity in multiple other realities. This type of management, though implicit, approximate and 'imperfect', employs an inclusive geometry without mechanical dependency on explicit 'things' and their causal kinetics, ... which 'scales up' 'ecologically', from individual to community to global society to environment to cosmos, satisfying the whole-and-part harmony needs of a multiple-reality containing environment as it does so.

A Historical Look at Relativistic Effects on Systems Behaviour

The futility of 'bottom-up' single reality based perceptive approaches to modeling natural systems has been known and discussed since the time of Johannes Kepler, who noted that nature inevitably seeks a multi-reality harmony of 'whole-and-part', a harmony-giving which is innate in the potential field configuration, and which cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the 'parts' ('parts' which are essentially 'features' of the whole in the relativistic 'field' theory of Einstein). As Kepler says, in 'Harmonice Mundi'; "Nun aber tragen zur Vervollkommnung der Welt mehr die Gesamtharmonien aller Planeten bei als die einzelnen Harmonien bei je zwei und die Paare von Harmonien bei je zwei benachbarten Planeten. Denn die Harmonie ist gewissermaßen ein Band der Vereinigung. Es liegt aber eine weitergehende Vereinigung vor, wenn alle Planeten miteinander eine Harmonie bilden, als wenn immer je zwei für sich in doppelter Weise harmonieren. Im Widerstreit dieser Harmonien mußte daher von den beiden Harmoniereihen, die die Planetenpaare miteinander bilden, die eine oder andere nachgeben, damit die Gesamtharmonien aller bestehen konnte." (http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~za146/barock/harmonie.htm#Kepplers Fehlschläge)

["Now, the 'harmony-of-the-whole of all the planets contributes more to the perfection of the world than the single harmonies by twos and the pairs of harmonies by the twos of neighbouring planets. For harmony is, so to speak, a volume [containerful] of unity. A deeper unity yet is presented, when all the planets form a harmony with each another, as when just two at a time harmonize in a bivalent manner. In the interference of these harmonies deriving from the dual harmonic line-ups, which the pairs of planets form with each another, the one or the other must give way, so that the harmony-of-the- whole can prevail."]

The primacy of 'order' emanating from the containing potential field configuration, as seen in 'the system of sun and planets', a natural 'archetype' for the relationship between harmony and structure, according to Kepler, ... is interpreted by us, in our habitude of putting material 'things' in the primacy over the relativistic ordering potentials of our containing space, ... in terms of 'things giving way to each other for the sake of preserving opportunity for all constituents'. The notion of 'things "giving way" for each other to cultivate persisting 'opportunity' or 'possibility' as seen from the 'perspective' of those multiple realities' implies a 'consciousness' of those 'things'. 'Consciousness' is thus tautologically defined in association with the synthetic notion of 'things''. In a pure 'field' theory as advocated by Einstein, there is no dependency on the notion of material 'things'. 'Things' are instead seen as secondary 'features' of the unbounded 'field'. As Einstein and Infeld say in 'The Evolution of Physics' [6];

"We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone [a concept which is in the primacy in the euclidian space convention, the mainstay of western mainstream science.]. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy."

The paradoxical issue of the 'consciousness' of inanimate material 'things', disappears with the disappearance of the dependency on 'things', since 'consciousness' is tautologically defined in terms of a 'property of certain things'. When the ordering in nature draws, in the primary sense, from the 'shape' of space as implied by the 'potential field configuration', ... man's consciousness is relegated to a local 'feature' of the evolutionary ordering potentials in his containing space-time landscape.

The general theory of relativity with its 'space-over-matter' implications, not only accommodates all existing scientific theory, it goes farther than any other theory has ever gone in simulating and predicting complex behaviours in nature (e.g. how the tiny deviation of Mercury's orbit from a perfect ellipse makes it instead a spiral which performs a complete rotation around the sun every three million years, ... a now confirmed natural behavior which is unexplainable by any other scientific theory. This departure from the perfect ellipse (Kepler's first Law) was cited as a qualification in Kepler's 'Harmonies of the World' in 'Axiom IV' on 'The Genesis of the Eccentricities in the Single Planets From the Procurement of the Consonances between their Movements" (a title which manifests Kepler's belief in the primacy of the containing space over the contained constituents). The Axiom is stated thus;

"IV. Axiom: All the planets ought to have their eccentricities diverse, no less than a movement in latitude, and in proportion to those eccentricities also their distances from the sun, the source of movement, diverse.

As the essence of movement consists not in being but in becoming , so too the form or figure of the region which an planet traverses in its movement does not become solid immediately from the start but in the succession of time acquires at last not only length but also breadth and depth (its perfect ternary of dimensions); and, gradually, thus, by the interweaving and piling up of many circuits, the form of a concave sphere comes to be represented --- just as out of the silk-worm's thread, by the interweaving and heaping together of many circles, the cocoon is built."

In this statement and in many others, Kepler puts the harmonic 'becoming' induced by the containing space in primacy over the fixed absolute 'being' of euclidian structure. His three laws are all laws of relative geometry without mention of material explicits (i.e. elliptical orbits, equal areas swept in equal time, common ratio for all planets of the square of the orbital period to the cube of the orbital radius) This relativistic 'space-over-matter' view of natural systems, denied by the science of Newton and denied or ignored up to this day by mainstream science, provides the basic definition for 'complex systems' (i.e. a system in which the overall behaviour of the system manifests a 'deeper unity' than can be deduced from the behaviours of the components.)

The Systems Sciences View of Natural Systems

Ross Ashby [7] alludes to this fundamental shortfall in our scientific systems inquiry, saying; "... there are complex systems that just do not allow the varying of only one factor at a time--they are so dynamic and interconnected that the alteration of one factor immediately acts as cause to evoke alterations in others, perhaps in a great many others. Until recently, science tended to evade the study of such systems, focusing its attention on those that were simple and, especially reducible. . . . In the study of some systems, however, the complexity could not be wholly evaded. The cerebral cortex of the free-living organism, the ant-hill as a functioning society, and the human economic system were outstanding both in their practical importance and in their intractability by the older methods. So today we see psychoses untreated, societies declining, and the economic systems faltering, the scientist being able to do little more than to appreciate the full complexity of the subject he is studying. But science today is also taking the first steps towards studying "complexity" as a subject in its own right."

To repeat once again, for emphasis --- In systems in nature, as Kepler clearly asserted and Newton ignored, a relativistic principle persists which must be accounted for in a manner as can be seen in the metaphor of the game of pool, ... wherein the effect of the 'shape' of the containing configuration overrides or 'includes' as a dependent subset, the kinetic effect of the 'shots', .... i.e., the englobing potential field configuration associated with the 'system features' (aka 'parts') is the source of a 'deeper unity' in systems behaviors than can be determined by the material-causal behaviors of the individual 'parts' (aka 'systems features'). One must manage 'shape-over-shots', since managing 'shots-over-shape' is a single-reality activity which engenders dissonance and dysfunction in our multi-reality containing environment.

In examing the role of language in systems inquiry, we come back to this primacy of the potential field configuration or 'possibility space' aspect of the containing whole over the kinetics of its constituents, and the fact that the initial categorization of system features into 'independent' parts for the study of their properties and behaviors is the arbitrary, language-based habitude of man which he imposes on his science, but cannot impose on nature. The harmony of the englobing cosmos and its included biosphere feature is not reduced to the sum of the material-causal behaviours of what man chooses to refer to as the 'earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere', simply because man has found it convenient to reduce our multivalent 'outer-inner' (volumetric) experience to a 'bivalent' flatspace language-compliant visualization of independent 'parts' and their curvilinear trajectories which excludes the participatory role of space, the potential field configuration which is reciprocally transformed by material motion.

Resource management and competition, as practiced in the western culture, forgets or denies this 'shape-over-shots' systems principle which deals with the 'commons' of space, ... space as a 'mediator' between 'multiple realities', whose configurational shape constitutes a 'possibility space' which 'gates' material-causal actuality. Western society 'disfigures' possibility space by operating in terms of 'sovereign property' and competition 'amongst the parts', forgetting that the parts are secondary features of the containing whole, which we have CHOSEN to categorize and label and, in our forgetfulness of their secondary nature, hoist up into the primacy and build our systems of perceiving, inquiring and managing on top of this forgetfulness and/or denial. In this 'forgetfulness and denial' based systems inquiry, ... the mainstay of today's sciences and systems sciences, ... our perceptions of 'systems behavior' excludes from consideration the behaviours of those constituents which are outside of the arbitrary and unnatural intellectual boundaries of the single reality of sovereign state (corporation, nation etc.) and the single reality which excludes those 'things' which lie below our 'competitively less performant' thresholds.

But, as discussed, by the theory of relativity, one cannot selectively focus in on those features of a system (a 'single reality') one subjectively prefers to observe and assume that the other features are negligable, any more than a player could, in the game of pool, focus in on the 'shots' he sees as being important to the game in his particular reality, ... and 'forget' about the balls which 'are not moving' within his reality, ... but which may relativistically move into spatial positions of decreased opportunity relative to the realities of his team partner. If any ball moves, then all balls are in relative motion, ... and the significance of the moves does not emanate from the choice of euclidian inertial reference frame but from the observer's reality in the ongoing evolution of the game, a reality whose kinetics may be coordinated with multiple other realities or not.

The 'Fundamental Hole' in Traditional Western Management Thinking

Thus, there is a fundamental hole in systems thinking which has been carried in to the practices of managing in terms of sovereign property and competition amongst independent parts. The 'hole' is that one cannot exclude from consideration constituents deemed 'static' as a result of lying outside of the arbitrary boundaries of the corporation and one cannot exclude constituents deemed 'static' as a result of lying below certain 'non-performant' resource thresholds, since when moves are made 'within sovereign property' and within the 'club' of the 'more performant' resources, ... everything moves in a relativistic, potential-field configuration sense, since everything is included within the commons of our multi-reality nature. A systems inquiry which fails to account for multi-reality interference effects is an 'unnatural' systems inquiry which infuses dissonance and dysfunction into our containing environment.

As with the example of the baseball bat seen as 'static' with zero velocity and kinetic energy in one reality, ... while the pedestrian whopped on the head by it in his reality, ... as the car speeds past him at thirty miles an hour, ... 'experiences it' as having a decidely non-zero velocity and kinetic energy, so also with the systems inquiry of nations, corporations and individuals, in that the reference-frame dependent physics of one reality has a 'blind spot' with respect potential field influences, and does not automatically take into account the reference-frame dependent physics of other, interfering realities, with their differing allocations of potential versus kinetic energy. The mom-and-pop 'corner grocery store' down the street from the supermarket does not see the same 'kinetics' as the supermarket. Flows of custom and sales which the supermarket manipulates in what seems like a slow or low energy fashion, ... may feel like a tornado or the whop of a baseball bat on the side of the head to the mom-and-pop store. While medieval community experienced a 'natural evolution' in which the niches of community need were progressively filled, ... a space-over-matter management geometry, ... the modern community sees itself in the monetary terms of a site for 'investment'. Money is 'liquid kinetics', ... it 'makes things happen', ... but it induces a 'blindness' and insensitivity to reciprocal transformation effects. Thus putting 'financial management' into the primacy over 'opportunity management' equates to 'matter-over-space' systems inquiry, ... and to opening the community up for ASIDS infection where they begin to actually believe that the single reality of the organization they are in is 'the correct reality'.

The Policy of Exclusion, and its Psycho-Social Ramifications

The same is true at the state and nation level, ... as is apparent from the complaints of youth such as have been recently articulated in Quebec at 'Le Sommet du Québec' et de la jeunesse. During this youth-government summit meeting (which was punctuated by teargas attacks from police and charges by youth that the summit was 'rigged' and was 'an exercise in hypocrisy'), the youth maintained that the 'true priorities', are the battle against poverty and exclusion, ... while the actual priorities of the government were manifestly the "competitiveness of companies and competition amongst youth which puts 'out of play' those deemed to be 'less performant'.

The exclusionary, 'matter-over-space' kinetics-based systems inquiry and management of western governments, aka 'colonialism', unlike the 'space-over-matter' 'opportunity-based systems inquiry and management of the indigenous tradition, requires a single, consistent euclidian reference framework. Such a framework is constructed upon the notion of 'probability and statistics', ... which in turn are based on the properties and kinetic behaviours of material 'things', ... which in turn are the synthetic invention of rational intellect and bivalent language imposed upon the local, field intensity features. To determine who is 'normal' in a psychological sense, we examine the behaviours in our community on a statistical basis. Thus the red savage who eats the heart of his defeated opponent, even if out of respect for the containing nature which gave the gift of courage to his opponent, ... is unlike to score high on the 'normality' index when amongst a predominantly white community.

Similarly, the schizophrenic is seen as being 'defective' in his own right on the basis of statistical norms, ... out of the context of his containing environment which, according to psychologists such as R.D. Laing and Peter Breggin and anthropologists such as Jules Henry and Albert Camus, ... put him in the double bind position of having to 'betray' his authentic self and 'become absurd' in order to gain access to the love, respect and resources of his containing world, ... natural resources 'stolen' by a dominating colonial society and sold back to its constituency in exchange for their conformity.

Causal Extremism in the Physical and Mental Health Professions

The relativistic view of systems puts the perception of dynamical equilibria of potential field configurations into the primacy over the secondary view of 'material cause', ... and this inverts the whole outlook on mental and physical health. That is, phenomena are viewed, relativistically, in terms of multivalent outer-inner co-dynamics instead of material cause. Thus, instead of looking for 'defects' to repair in the domains of mental and physical health, ... one looks for 'disequilibria' which need to be restored to equilibrium.

Such an outlook appears to be in resonance with those, such as Peter Duesberg, retrovirologist, [Professor of molecular biology at Univ. of California at Berkeley and member of National Academy of Sciences] who says that: "HIV is just a latent, and perfectly harmless, retrovirus that most but not all AIDS patients happen to carry. To say that HIV is the cause of AIDS is to cast aside everything we know about retroviruses... The HIV theory is inconsistent, paradoxical, and absurd..."

Robert Root-Bernstein, a professor of physiology at Michigan State University, another of a growing number of scientists who argue against HIV being the 'CAUSE' of AIDS, speaks in terms of a 'multifactorial' ('relational interference') view of AIDS in his book, 'Rethinking AIDS; The tragic cost of premature consensus' (1993).

The AIDS controversy seems to be shifting the models of medicine towards an inversion to the relativistic model wherein the 'healthy system' is one which is in a codynamical, spherically nested, outer-inner balance, ... and the symptoms of an illness, rather than indicating a 'problem' which needs to be eliminated (the secondary 'kinetics' view), indicate a codynamical imbalance. In this model, the notion that the immune system is an army of little white knights which attack invaders gives way to the 'pool game' notion where the opportunity for all participants in a multi-reality process need to be sustained in a balanced way. This 'restoration of codynamical equilibria' is the basic premise of homeopathy, which is currently enjoying massive growth in Europe (bolstered by quantum physics evidence of 'white holes' which explain the heretofore inexplicable health-restoring impact of highly diluted solutions of natural substances), but which the more extreme 'kinetics' orientation of North America is yet resisting.

The relativistic model of a flowing codynamical equilibria, with its spherically nested fractal structures was poetically described by Lewis F. Richardson, a meteorologist who was among the first to suggest numerical weather simulation;

This euclidian 'elimination of cause' systems approach is a general one in western medicine, and lies behind the massive increase in prescription drug usage. According to many researchers, such as Dr. Peter Breggin, and in accordance with our common sense, drugs do not eliminate the cause of symptoms since they emanate from 'outer-inner' imbalances, they simply suppress the symptoms by disabling those natural subsystems which are trying to bring the supersystem back into a dynamical equilibrium. Breggin (see www.breggin.com), in speaking about the rapidly growing use of the drug Ritalin on young children says;

"

Ritalin "works" by producing malfunctions in the brain rather than by improving brain function. This is the only way it works.

Ritalin and amphetamine have almost identical adverse effects on the brain, mind and behavior, including the production of drug-induced behavioral disorders, psychosis, mania, drug abuse, and addiction."

"Our society has institutionalized drug abuse among our children. Worse yet, we abuse our children with drugs rather than making the effort to find better ways to meet their needs. In the long run, we are giving our children a very bad lesson--that drugs are the answer to emotional problems. We are encouraging a generation of youngsters to grow up relying on psychiatric drugs rather than on themselves and other human resources."

At its most extreme, material-causal systems inquiry is leading to research programs which fully exclude container-constituent-codynamical effects. For example, millions of dollars of public monies being spent today in the United States (and elsewhere) in the search for the 'schizophrenia gene' or 'schizophrenia virus' and the violence gene, ... the 'causal agents' of 'matter-over-space' systems inquiry which are seen to cause these 'behavioral defects' in 'things', ... defects seen 'in their own right' and identified statistically according to a single cultural reality, ... all that the non-relativistic euclidian kinetics oriented inquiry will allow.

Barry Mehler [8] documents this current trend, which is far from a fringe effort but being funded by public taxes and management by respected scientific agencies;

"THE "VIOLENCE INITIATIVE" America's top scientific funding agencies for health and science research are spending millions of tax dollars on research that seeks to control violence through genetic engineering and drugs. In 1992, for example, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council issued a 400 page report titled "Understanding and Preventing Violence." Funded in part by the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation, the report called for more attention to "biological and genetic factors in violent crime." In particular it called for more research on "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior," and it asked researchers to determine whether male or black persons have a higher potential for violence, and if so, why? At the same time, the Center for Disease Control submitted its own proposal in June of 1992 to coordinate the efforts of seven federal agencies in what they called a "youth violence prevention initiative."

Until Goodwin stepped down in April 1994 as NIMH director, he administered the "Violence Initiative," a conglomerate of over 300 research projects "focusing on screening out and treating preventively violence prone individuals."(2) This ongoing program, which Goodwin described as the U.S. government's "highest science priority," applies the tools of behavior genetics to detect "biological markers" in "at risk" inner city children and to treat them with drugs "at a very early age before they have become criminalized" (Washington Post, July 29, 1992). The NIMH has already committed more than $150 million to the Violence Initiative, including a $12 million pharmaceutical study of Ritalin.

THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT The largest U.S. government funded research in the history of the biomedical sciences - the $3 billion Human Genome Project (HGP), designed to map our the entire human genetic code HGP proponents, such as Daniel Koshland, editor of the prestigious journal Science, have claimed that discoveries resulting from HGP research will help cure society of crime, poverty, and other social ills. Koshland, a biochemist by training, wrote, "It is time the world recognizes that the brain is an organ like any other... and that it can go wrong not only as a result of abuse, but also because of hereditary defects utterly unrelated to environmental influences" (editorial, Science, October 12, 1990)." [8]

The more extensively that 'matter-over-space' management is 'scaled-up', the more absurd it becomes, since it is capable of no more than a single reality. Such management, ... which seeks to reduce our multi-reality world down to a single 'norms-based' reality through the use of statistical techniques operating on the properties and behaviors of 'things', ... is not simply 'the tyranny of the majority', ... it is the tyranny of the absurd, if not the insane. The global economy, which subordinates 'opportunity' to the liquid kinetics of monetary finance, extends this insanity to its ultimate state of deployment.

The Cultural Perpetuation of Flatspace Reality

The 'single reality' attack on the 'kinematics' of systems behaviors, ... and the ignoring of the reciprocal, implicit 'potentials' of the multi-reality containing environment lead to a vicious cycle of dysfunction. Because the western culture puts rational intelligence (high IQ) in the primacy over relational intelligence in its educational system, and since 'rational-over-relational' satisfies the needs of 'matter-over-space' systems inquiry, ... there is a continual 'purification' underway in the culture which concentrates the 'rational-over-relational' skills profile and the 'matter-over-space' systems inquiry in the seats of power. This 'purification' is occurring by the differential 'gating' of access to the land and its natural resources and to the affluence derived from our containing earth, ... a differential gating which favours intensification and globalization of single- reality 'kinetics management' at the expense of multi-reality 'opportunity management'.

As this 'absurd' system intensifies by population growth (a 'consumable resource') and through science and technology leveraging, it tends to become impervious to the complaints of the increasing numbers of those whose 'realities' do not mesh with the prevailing 'single reality' and whose access to the global commons is denied by this 'mismatch'. When elements within the marginalized sector become violent, the rational perspective is to reference this against the prevailing single-reality statistical norms and to view departures as problems which must be eliminated, ... thus programs of 'purification' or 'cultural cleansing' are initiated which intensify the degree to which the environment is toxic to the realities of the marginalized minorities. As a result, the violence intensifies and the programs of purification are further intensified.

Since children 'model' after authority figures and since the western educational system persists in teaching euclidian systems inquiry in which explicit 'kinematics' are said to be all that's necessary in systems inquiry, ... the 'Acquired System Inquiry Deficiency Syndrome' (ASIDS), cultivated in this 'breeder' mode, progressively purges the perception and inquiry modes needed for the system to become self-aware of its own self-sourcing of dysfunction through its 'incoherent' dysfunction-purging initiatives.

A Relativistic View of July/2000 ISSS Congress in Toronto

We, the participants in this ISSS Congress, are inducing transformation in the containing environment or 'system' within which we are immersed constituent- participants. This is common sense reality. What's more, this is a thought which is bigger than can be handled by the 'kinetics' based systems theory we typically work with, ... and innately so, as has been discussed.

The incompleteness is as described in 'The Law of Requisite Knowledge' --- 'In order to adequately compensate perturbations, a control system must "know" which action to select from the variety of available actions --- and in the associated 'Principle of Incomplete Knowledge' --- 'The model embodied in a control system is necessarily incomplete.' ---, a principle derivable from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and from our experience that 'a system cannot represent itself completely, and hence cannot have complete knowledge of how its own actions may feed back into the perturbations.' (Francis Heylighen, 'Principles of Systems and cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective, http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~richardw/Systems_Principles.txt)

The answer to the incompleteness is not to ignore it but to understand the nature of it, and respond accordingly. Right now, in our western culture, as David Bohm has suggested, the thought of this uncertainty elicits an uncomfortable 'feeling' while the thought of further pursuing certainty-enhancing 'controls' elicits a pleasurable feeling. This is leading to the intensification of 'incoherence' in Bohm's terms; i.e. the gap between where we want to go and where we are going is continuing to widen.

My point in referencing this part of my essay discussion to the current reality of this ISSS Congress is not to say that 'we should not do' what we are doing. While I may have empathy for those who think in terms of 'should' (i.e. who 'manage' on the basis of bivalent judgement), ... it has become less and less 'my way', and nor is it the 'way' of the indigenous peoples' tradition. The point of view I am trying to share deals with the observation by Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1946 essay 'La responsibilite de l'ecrivain' ('The Responsibility of the writer), ... that there is a responsibility associated with all creative acts, ... because such acts do not begin and end with the kinetics of the act itself, ... kinetic acts transform 'possibility space', the containing 'potential field' landscape in which we are immersed constituents and participants. Our kinetics transform in the same manner as the sandgrain transforms, in its tumbling down the slipface of a dune, its containing 'dune-scape'. This is a transformation which changes the possibilities for all constituents within the containing space, ... and it happens whether we like it or not. We can ignore it and/or deny it and inherit a rising 'debt' as we attempt to defer the 'payback' by more intensive efforts at kinetic controls, ... but the geometry required to 'beat' the relativistic processes in 'single reality mode' is a bizarre 'strange loop' geometry, such as M. C. Escher's 'The Waterfall' which cannot work out in a practical sense, in the presence of gravity.

The alternative geometry, in the indigenous peoples traditions, is based on the perception that nature is a multi-reality commons within which community is a simultaneous, INCLUDED feature, as is supported by the theory of relativity and its curved space reciprocal disposition aspect. Thus the use of the land and gifts of the land, including the media of communications, the air and the wave-carrying ether, ... the 'commons of silence' in the terms of Ilich and McLuhan, ... must comprehend the opportunity needs of multiple realities, ... the multiple realities of different cultures and different species and different substances.

Such comprehension appears to be the gift of nature to all of its constituents, and management on this 'multi-reality opportunity' is manifestly possible, as in the experience of the indigenous peoples, and in exceptional teams and situations within the western world.

My point is, in other words, that science and the systems sciences are capable of addressing the manner in which their own creative activities and products induce change in the containing environment. I initially thought, falsely so, as it appears now, that systems sciences projects commonly accounted for this induced change, ... that the systems sciences, as Heisenberg, Laborit and others have suggested, had already begun to 'include the tools of inquiry in their inquiry'; i.e. that the systems sciences were perceiving systems in relativistic 'space-over-matter' and 'multi-reality opportunity management' terms.

What I am recognizing now is that when systems scientists speak of 'the systems view' and 'observer involvement and influence', ... it is most often in an observer-excluding context of the 'sequential unity and plurality' of euclidian space, ... where the systems sciences community is seen as an independent part of its englobing environment rather than in the observer-including, relativistic 'local feature' context of 'simultaneous unity and plurality' of curved space. That is, the 'systems view' seems often to be portrayed as a 'view in its own right', a 'single reality' perspective rather than a multi-reality collective access portal into the ordering potentials of our containing space-time.

It is by the imposing of an independently existing systems view on natural multi-reality phenomena that systems inquiry and systems management regress to the linear 'kinetics'- based approach. In this approach the scientist comes to conferences to discover and model the 'problems out there' and, like a 'white knight', to ride to the rescue with the intent of 'eliminating the problem', .... a problem seen to exist 'in its own right', ... out of the context of the reciprocal transformation of the 'motherspace' of possibility, induced by his gallant ride.

What is needed instead, in the move away from incoherence to coherence in the sciences, is a re-embrace of 'space-over-matter' geometry of relativity and all of the multi-reality diversity and messiness which that entails. Only by re-vitalizing the natural ethic of 'multi-reality opportunity management' within the kinetic agents, ... the individual, ... the enterprise, ... the community, ... the nation, is this achievable.

This does not say that our traditional euclidian systems science is uninteresting or not useful, ... it says, instead, that this euclidian aspect must be engendered as a secondary feature within the broader landscape of our overall containing reality; i.e., as in the indigenous traditions, relativistic systems inquiry must become an included or 'lived' feature or 'way' of life, which opens up the sacred space for 'becoming', rather than a tool which 'can be applied' to life.

My interest, in these times of exponentiating complexity cultivated by 'science for science's sake', is in those efforts aimed at inducing science's transformational rebirth into the broader, relativistic, landscape of a science which includes its tools of inquiry within its inquiry, ... a landscape in which the linear exploitation of a scientific subspace no longer occurs in an 'in its own right' manner, but occurs, instead, as a subfeature within the broader landscape of a self-aware, man-immersed-in-nature culture, ... a science which no longer 'does science for science' sake', but a science seen as an included feature of a multi-reality containing environment which naturally assumes its responsibility for the continuing transformation it induces in its own containing environment by the knowledge it creates and by the complexifying kinetics which stem from its knowledge-extended possibility space.

Commensurate with an embrace of relativistic systems inquiry, my interests in 'community as complex system' transcend culture and thus, for example, I feel no co-resonance with the non-relativistic western faith in a statistical ethics based on 'the universal knowledge of good', nor in the notion of 'progress' deemed 'good' in its own right, ... concepts which owe their existence to the abstract notion of an exclusionary, bivalent reality. Similarly, I feel no co-resonance with the predominantly 'kinetics-oriented' notion of "a scientific forum --- for addressing the many challenges that humankind will face in the new century, and for --- understanding complexity". Since I am writing this essay in advance of the Congress, I do not know how the balance of 'possibility space' (opportunity management) orientation versus 'actuality space' (kinetics management) orientation will emerge at/from the conference, and in any case, this is not explicitly determinable.

Meanwhile, there will be some 'strong indications'. For example, if the systems sciences definition of a social system is examined --- "the system as a whole, which we, at the same time consider as part of, and embedded in, its containing environment", --- this implies a relativistic view, ... wherein we must consider not only the 'kinetics' of what happens as a result of the ISSS Congress, ... but also, and at the same time, ... what transformation is the Congress itself inducing in its containing environment? (through the participants etc.), the transformation being more important than whether or not the products of the Congress are cadillacs or cornflakes. In most technical conferences, ... the theoretical products themselves tend to be hotly debated, while the opportunity for multi-reality visualization and induced transformation opportunity falls through the cracks.

If we take the indigenous tradition of the sharing circle as a reference base for the Congress orientation, ... the 'management of opportunity' is furthered by a sharing of experience, rather than debating 'the way things are out there', ... and by this sharing, the participants bring the multiple perspectives of the participants into connection in their minds, ... giving us an implicit understanding, at low resolution to be sure, of our multi-reality containing environment. Equipped with this understanding, we shall be better positioned to respond within our own environments in such a way as cultivates opportunities for other realities at the same time as we act on our own needs. This assumes that the 'sharing' is 'from the heart' and puts the natural issues in the primacy over theoretical content. In the case where the meeting starts from a narcissist focus on the systems sciences and debates theory out of the context of the englobing, multi-reality container, the Congress will be emulating the dissonance producing 'matter- over- space' inquiry.

Sharing my own personal perspective, I appreciate the opportunity to dialogue, and my interest is not in producing yet more fragmented 'judgement' about 'what needs to be done' but in cultivating and inductively catalyzing understanding of the way the world works, ... understanding which incorporates our consciousness of the continuing transformational effects of our expressed thoughts and actions on our containing environment,... and fosters an environment supportive of the ontogenic needs of the upcoming generation.

Grafting onto the More Robust Relativistic 'Systems Rootstock' of Indigenous Tradition

Ernie Benedict, a Mohawk Elder, sees the earth as a mother who we must respect and care for, ... to use the gifts she has given us in caring for her. Ernie sees those gifts as having been stolen and held hostage by the colonizers, who apportion them out only to those who would join with them and be accomplices to the theft. Ernie says;

"But when we move over to their side, then we are in possession of all that loot that has been stolen from us, or from our forefathers, then we would be put in a position of stealing from our own parents and grandparents. I don't think that's right, I don't think that's what we want."

Ernie Benedict's views are echoed in those of Henri Laborit, French biologist and philosopher who says, in "Les bases biologiques des comportements sociaux' (The biological basis of social behaviours); "Le monde occidental s'est approprie la matiere et l'energie situees dans des niches geoclimatiques habitees par des ethnies dont l'evolution technologique etait moindre. Mais a l'interieur meme de ce monde 'technise', la dominance s'est etablie sur la productivite en marchandises; or il semble certain que cette productivite est fonction du nombre de brevets et de techniciens qu'un groupe humain est capable de produire."

(The western world has appropriated the material and energy resources situated in those geoclimatic regions inhabited by cultures whose technological evolution is less well developed. But inside of this 'technologized' world, dominance is established on the basis of productivity of commercial goods; and it seems certain that this productivity is a function of the number of patents and technologists that a social group is capable of producing.' [Andorra and Liechtenstein had little chance of discovering the Laser])

The model here is clearly one of colonizing the 'commons', and for populations immersed in a finite and unbounded commons, as are the people of the planet earth, ... the appropriation of lands and the gifts of the earth, and their utilization and allocation within the context of a single reality, ... simultaneously and reciprocally, transforms (shrinks and snookers) the possibility space seen by multiple other realities. Not only is the 'commons' of our containing earth-sphere colonized, but as Illich and McLuhan point out, the 'commons of silence' has been similarly colonized. In McLuhan's words of warning from 'Understanding Media' (1967);

"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."

As previously discussed, ... while the relativistic 'space-over-matter' systems inquiry 'includes' the non-relativistic 'matter-over-space' inquiry as the special case where potential field interference pattern effects (the landscape of possibility) are ignored, ... the non-relativistic inquiry, being an explicit feature within a far broader implicit landscape, ... cannot possible contain relativistic inquiry. If one starts from a 'shots management' approach, ... it is not possible to 'add on' shape management (opportunity management). Seen from another vantage point, Ross Ashby's 'Law of Requisite Variety' says that "The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate."

Thus Ernie Benedict's insight in not wanting to 'join in with the thieves' finds further validation in the theory of relativity and in Ashby's Law, and we seem to be deprived of a more comprehensive regulatory system needed for today's complexity, unless we can find a way to 'make room for it'.

Such insight is not only coming into the minds of the indigenous peoples, youth in general is becoming increasingly aware that this subjective exclusion in western management and regulation of 'those who don't count' because they are perceived as 'not moving' by the single reality of 'colonizing' management (those who control movement within a sovereign organization) is built upon a bogus mode of systems inquiry. This increasing recognition of the 'holes' in western systems inquiry was evident in the protests of the youth organizations of Québec, mentioned earlier. The conflict between youth and regulatory process in Québec is one of many manifestations of the non-relativistic 'kinetics' focus of western inquiry, ... a constrained, self-blindering focus which leads to the notion of optimizing 'performant' resources and excluding consideration of those 'which are not moving', ... mastering 'shots' while ignoring 'shape', ... a non-relativistic recipe for dissonance and dysfunction.

Ernie Benedict said it implicitly and Einstein said it explicitly, ... relativity and curved space-time are to traditional science (systems inquiry as embodied in western management and regulatory process) as a broad landscape is to one of its small contained features. You can't fit a containing landscape into one of its contained features unless you're an artist such as M. C. Escher (e.g. Escher's 'Print Gallery'). The aboriginal traditions are inherently 'relativistic' and spherical space-time based, ... and there is no way that they can 'fit in' to the western 'flatspace' management and regulatory schema.

An answer is to graft the incomplete rational initiatives of western culture onto the more robust systems rootstock of indigenous tradition. In order for this to happen, ... the words of Ernie Benedict might well be echoed and amplified to youth in general;

"do not allow yourself to be an empty bag for the educational system to fill'

And the 'educational system' may well be perceived in the extended terms of the culture at large for the purposes of this message. And what the culture at large has been teaching us, ... that is, what we have been teaching ourselves, ... is that when a rock rolls down the side of the mountain, ... we should focus on the rock and what it does and ignore the transformation of the 'possibility landscape' that is the informational and potential field reciprocal to this kinetic actuality. Meanwhile, our natural experience and our appreciation of the ways of nature tell us instead that the 'bigger story' is the transformation of the landscape, ... that the rock IS the mountain and that the manifest kinetic of the rock falling is the small story within the larger story of self-referential evolution of the containing landscape of possibility.

While it is said that we of the western culture 'worship at the altar of science and rationality', ... this comment seems to refer to the narrow science of western colonial management and regulation; i.e. to the 'strain' of science which puts material kinetics into the primacy of it's systems inquiry. Such a limited science may be the mainstay of our culture, but it is not the only strain of science in existence. Heraclitus, Kepler, Einstein, Poincaré and others saw a 'bigger science', ... a science having to do with 'understanding the way the world works' in a whole-and-part harmony sense which deepens the meaning to life, rather than in the narcissist 'science for science's sake' sense. Thus the youthful student would do far better to fill his own bag with such writings as the following from Poincaré, which bring the inquiry of east and west, south and north, into harmonic confluence.

... "The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.''

---Henri Poincaré

* * *

[1] Lumley, Ted (1999). Is Evolutionary Computing Evolving? Complexity, Vol. 5, No. 2, November/December 1999

[2] Henagulph, Seb, essay. The Three Pillars of Transdisciplinarity (http://www.goodshare.org/pillars#seb.htm) citing Nicolescu, B.(1998) Gödelian Aspects of Nature and Knowledge . Bulletin Interactif du Centre International de Recherches et Études transdisciplinaires nhttp://perso.club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/

[3] Claerbout, Jon and Dellinger, Joe (web essay), Eisner's reciprocity paradox and its resolution http://sepwww.stanford.edu/oldsep/joe/oldArticles/Eisner/README.html

[4] Gabor, Denis (1944), Theory of Communication (1945). Journal of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

[5] Poincaré, Henri. (1897). The Relativity of Space (from Science & Method ) http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm

[6] Einstein, A, and Infeld, L. (1938). The Evolution of Physics. Simon & Schuster

[7] Ashby, W.R. (1964), An Introduction to Cybernetics . London; Nethuen & Co. Ltd. (Originally published in 1956). http://www.schillermadrid.edu/heglar/info.htm

[8] Mehler, Barry, (1994) In Genes We Trust: When Science Bows to Racism , Reform Judaism (Winter 1994) pp. 10-14; 77-79 http://www.breggin.com/Mehlerart.html, bmehler@netonecom.net

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