Harmonic Incubators of Inner-Space Latencies

Montreal, May 20, 1999

http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/incubate.htm

Zeus: I see that the Gazette wants to interview Pierre on the Y2K preparations in Quebec, ... what do you think of that?

Emile: ... pffahhhh, ... parasites!

Zeus: ... What do you mean 'parasites'?

Emile: They weren't at all interested when Pierre was looking for support in trying to brew the needed pre-awareness for the community's safe-passage through Y2K, ... to help stir the latencies within the community into a harmonic confluence, ... but now they've decided to do an ad hoc general series of articles on Y2K preparations, ... to look down on the landscape like visitors from Mars, ... and so they come to Pierre to 'strip-mine' him for his knowledge. So its the same old upside-down runaway, 'parasite of outer-space actualities' geometry.

Zeus: Oh, I think I see what you mean. Yes, the notion of media as a means of seeing and understanding ourselves as a community, definitely seems to have inverted, with the media playing the role of a non-participating voyeur, an after-the-fact stand-by, waiting for a visible eruption of the actuality, and selectively rushing over to capture the most marketable of these as quickly and in as much detail as possible, ... with an emphasis on the chaotic and aberrant to be sure.

Emile: What do you think is the reciprocal of a 'parasite of outer-space actualities', Zeus?

Zeus: ... I'd say it would have to be an 'incubator of inner-space latencies'.

Emile: Yes, I like that, ... ... Do you remember what Kepler said about 'inner space' and 'outer space', when he spoke about how the system of sun and planets were an archetype for human intellection, in Harmonia Mundi?

Zeus: As I recall, he said he was tapping the wisdom of ancient egypt, associated with the sphere-within-sphere geometry of the solar system, .... where, if you detached yourself from the center and were 'looking in to' the sphere of revolution of, for example, the earth, which 'spins' itself out over many years, like a cocoon in space, ... at venus, mercury and the sun, ... then it made of you a kind of a flat-space voyeur, .... a parasite of the visible, so to speak, ... which associated with 'ratiocinative intellection' or 'rationality', ... and if you were instead 'coming from the center', ... looking out from the sun or from a lying-on-your-back position on the earth's sphere of revolution, ... towards jupiter and saturn, ... then it made you a kind of curved-space participant, ... a kind of incubator of the latencies of inner-space, ... and that, he associated with 'intuitive intellection'.

Emile: ... and though it's easy to see that this geometrical or topological look defines two very different spaces, we resist talking about it or teaching it in science. Kepler, in fact, pointed out how the orbital structure and motions of the planets around the sun came together to constitute natural harmonic concordance ratios, and demonstrated this in Harmonia Mundi, in chapter 7. 'The Universal Consonances of all Six Planets, Like Common Four-Part Counterpoint, Can Exist', and in chapter 8. 'In the Celestial Harmonies Which Planet Sings Soprano, Which Alto, Which Tenor and Which Bass'? What Kepler was suggesting was that the latencies of inner space, ... coming from the center, ... were incubated into harmonies on a continuing basis, to constitute the solar system. This point was made all the more poignant when Poincare developed dynamical systems theory, and the notion of deterministic chaos in 1889, disproving Laplace's Newtonian based argument on the stability of the solar system, and showing that our solar system, and all such systems, are innately unstable over the long term.

Zeus: If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two sides to this 'deterministic chaos' coin, and that while there are butterflies loose in the system, which could take the system into chaos, .... they seem to have a greater proclivity, at least in those parts of nature where man has not interfered with the 'genetics', to incubate harmony, rather than chaos, ... and that Kepler tuned into this, if you'll pardon the pun.

Emile: Exactly, and it's only today that the most courageous scientists at the fringes of the mainstream will even talk about these 'Opheistic' thoughts, ... for example, the California math's prof Ralph Abraham in 'Chaos, Gaia and Eros', and the German biophysicist Friedrich Cramer in 'Chaos and Order', and of course Erich Jantsch in 'Design for Evolution', Capra and a minority handful of others.

The label of 'mysticism' was put on Kepler, because he believed, like Heraclitus and Proclus, ... that there was a divinity in the ordering processes in nature. Meanwhile, Newton, who was a very religious man in a fundamentalist sense, ... converted everything into a force-and-corpuscles schema, ... taking the divinity and harmony out of its centering in nature, and re-situating it beyond the fringe, turning It into a voyeur onlooker function. But as Jantsch points out, .... the idea of 'force' is already ad hoc, ... that is, we have already passed by the whole issue of the incubation of harmonies from an innately unstable dynamical system, ... by the time we get to the notion of 'force'. Passing over the essence of how the butterflies in the system make music instead of dissonance seems like a rather large omission for a 'science' which is purportedly interested in understanding, in the most profound way possibly, how the world works.

Zeus: Ok, ... so if we bring this geometry back with us into the domain of community, ... you're saying that if we think of community as a sphere, we can either think of it as if we are immersed in it and are participating in the incubation of harmonies, ... or we can be detached from it and looking down at it, waiting for the actualities to emerge, ... those actualities which most shock us, like atrocities and high school massacres and all these other things that the Gazette's and CNN's of the world sit around waiting for, ... in their 'parasite of outer-space actualities' role.

Emile: That's exactly right, Zeus. 'Mysticism' labels notwithstanding, it's only common sense to see that if you've got a community of diverse individuals, ... there's a zillion latencies resident in their continuing relational dynamic, only one of which will get incubated into visible reality at any given space-time coordinate. Now as Laborit and others point out, ... there are two 'ordering influences' on the sphere within sphere ecological structures in nature, ... that which comes from inner space, ... the community's harmony-incubation process, and the induced order coming from information exchanges with the outer-space which envelopes and contains that inner space. For example, in the system of a high school orchestra, ... when the young clarinet soloist gets up to do his thing, he is supported by the 'vibes' from his mates and this is part of the 'incubation of inner-space latencies', which helps him to come up with the goods, right? .... but you've seen what happens if a rascal in the front row of the audience, an outer-space voyeur, pulls out a lemon and starts eating it with all the sour face gestures which go along with that, right? ... the clarinetist lips pucker and squeeze in on the reed to the point that terrible dissonances begin to emerge.

Zeus: I take your point, and the image flows easily and clearly into my mind, .... Ladies and gentleman, .... we've got a really big shew for you tonight, ... I give you 'the Gazette' and 'CNN', ... community resources of critical influence on the incubating of latencies in our community, ... who are instrumental in the quality transformation of tacit and ambiguous possibility into the explict and manifest 'now', .... are we in for a jam session or what? .... let's hear it for the Gazette and CNN!

Emile: Yes, and in the wake of scene II of that unfolding, we'll have enough rotten vegetables to globalize the compost industry. But that's the point exactly, ... as the Brazilian natives say, ... when we dream together, it is the beginning of reality, ... and as the Australian aboriginals say, ... reality must be 'sung' into existence every day. Meanwhile in the west, we laugh and say, ... 'what quaint ideas these primitives have!', ... having convinced ourselves that the world is 'causal' which equates to purposelessness, ... so we sit on our voyeur butts waiting for the manifest to emerge and reporting on it, as if it had nothing to do with us, ... as if it were the random mechanical confluence of causal collisions. And if its bad news, as most of it which gets reported on seems to be, ... then comes the long analysis, ... why did he do it? .... why did he shoot his schoolmates, .... perhaps it was violence in the media, ... or too many guns, ... or ...

Zeus: ... or perhaps it was because we've got too many outer-space voyeurs and too few inner-space incubators, ... to many chickens focused on egg marketing opportunities, and too few pigs with 'skin in the game', as the bacon-and-egg breakfast metaphor goes. My ideal of the role of news media is the small town newspaper whose editoris the iconic soul-center of the community, ... who is naturally eager to listen to the aspirations of the townspeople, in phase with their ontogenetic cycles, as they try to incubate the inner space latencies of the community into continuing harmonies, ... for themselves and their children, and for the land and the future. Sure this editor reports on the tragedies, ... both local and in the world beyond, ... but he never allows himself to 'tune out' of the incubation-of-harmonies process, and this means that he comes at the media game from the perceptual mode of an immersed participant in this 'incubation of inner-space latencies' activity.

Emile: .... we're not talking 'rocket science' here with inner-space and outer-space or 'mogular space' and 'intermogular' space geometries, or whatever we want to call them, ... they're natural configurations, ... what happens HAS TO emerge from an incubation process, cultivated or uncultivated, ... from a zillion latencies where just one unique actuality is born and we call that 'now'. Do we want to work in a manner wherein we are conscious of our role in the collective incubation of the 'now' or do we want to sit back, voyeur-like and report on the emergent 'now' after-the-fact? Let's face it, ... we've become detached, homocentric and self-centred 'parasites of the visible' who are so unconscious of the harmonic incubation process, we're breeding genetically engineered products without a clue as to how they'll interlace with the whole of our continuing evolutionary dynamic, .... but we know one thing for sure, .... and that's that these monster products, born of a little knowledge and a lot of ignorance, are in no way being induced into being by a collective community dream.

Zeus: ... more like a collective nightmare, I would say. But when are we going to wake up from this nightmare?

Emile: Well, .... if we look at the geometry from another vantage point, it seems to be hinting that we are approaching an 'inversion'.

Zeus: .. Say what, Emile?, ... you think that our outer-space-inner-space perceptual mode is about ready to flip polarity? ... I know you're always going about the need to flip from voyeur to immersed mode, ... but it strikes me that the notion of an approaching flip is more wishful thinking than anything else.

Emile: Maybe yes, maybe no. ... you recall the 'logistic equation' which describes how predator-prey systems go into inversions, right?

Zeus: Yes, ... population fluctuations were the first and perhaps simplest examples of how a system could go into inversions and bifurcations and become chaotic. Things can happen fast when the thing that's growing is eating away the capacity of the environment to sustain it, ... like an exponentially growing population of rabbits which grows by consuming a limited area of grassland, the number of bunnies the available grassland can support declines in proportion to the growth in the number of bunnies, ... as if the increasing bunny population were eating away the carpet they were standing on. And right up until the point that they run out of carpet, everything looks great for bunnies, but suddenly, there's an inversion and all you can see is a recovering carpet and only a handful of bunnies.

Emile: Exactly, ... and do you not think that that's precisely where we're headed with this perceptual mode situation? We lost the primacy of the 'immersed' mode, .... the 'incubator of inner-space latencies' mode way back when. Some say that it was 'perspective' that dominated and stepped on it, as we went into the Enlightenment, ... and others maintain it was 2500 years ago when we put rationality and the explicit in the primacy over intuition and the tacit. In any case, everybody today is busy focusing on 'outer-space' and watching the hotspots out there in their employment and social scene and the political trouble spots all around the world, and they're giving short shrift to inner-space jamming with their neighbours or tuning in to the cultivation of the 'now'.

Zeus: Yes, we're so focused externally these days that we have lost all view of ourselves, ... and we've all got this nagging feeling that it's not a pretty sight. ... But though I can understand the predator-prey situation or the rabbits and the grass because there's two different categories of things involved, I have trouble with porting the analogy to the community circumstance where there's just one category of thing; i.e. the human category.

Emile: Not so, Zeus, ... we each have within us a 'parasite of outer-space actualities' as well as an 'incubator of inner-space latencies', and our parasite aspect has been busily consuming our incubator aspect, ... it's the same geometry as the rabbits and grass, ... except that the ante has been upped and we've shifted into the domain of qualitative 'order'. That is, we're consuming the natural diversity and harmony out there in 'outer-space', by imposing structure on people and nations, by polluting the land, sea and atmosphere in all sorts of ways, by infecting our evolution with genetically engineered obstroceties etc., ... and by so doing, we are reducing the carrying capacity of the environment in qualitative terms by contaminating our inputs with our exhaust. It reminds me of boat sinkings in the Louisiana Offshore, each time a subsea gaswell blows out, ... boats get curious and go over to play in the bubbles, ... but the gassy froth no longer has sufficient buoyancy to keep the boat afloat, ... so down it goes like a lump of lead, ... 300 feet to the bottom.

Zeus: The 'eating out the carpet from under ourselves' was less disturbing than that 'being sunk by our own petard' imagery, ... but what is coming into my mind is that we are eating our own guts out, ... and, hey, .... this is not a pretty sight. But nevertheless, .... it strikes me, that instead of an inversion, we're heading towards mass suicide, either literally or by drugs, alcohol, war etc. .... I don't see all these 'incubator of inner-space latency' aspects of people flipping into the primacy just like that.

Emile: Just as with the rabbits, if it happens, you won't see it until it reaches the climax, but then it can happen very, very fast. Meanwhile, though, one should be able to spot the anticipatory signs, ... and indeed one does hear talk about our returning of 'tacit' inner-space understanding as opposed to 'explicit' outer-space knowledge to the primacy. This equates to reestablishing the primacy of 'incubation of inner-space latencies', ... as is easily seen in statements such as that of Gary Zukav;

"The Copenhagen Interpretation [of Quantum Mechanics] was, in effect, a recognition of the limitations of left hemispheric thought [explicit knowledge], although the physicists at Brussels in 1927 could not have thought in those terms. It was also a 're - cognition' of those psychic aspects which long had been ignored in a rationalistic society. After all, physicists are essentially people who wonder at the universe. To stand in awe and wonder is to understand in a very specific way, even if that understanding cannot be described. The subjective experience of wonder is a message to the rational mind that the object of wonder is being perceived and understood in [implicit] ways other than the rational. The next time you are awed by something, let the feeling 'flow' freely through you and do not try to 'understand' it. You will find that you 'do understand', but in a [n implicit] way that you will not be able to [explicitly] put into words. You are perceiving intuitively through your right hemisphere. It has not atrophied from lack of use, but our skill in listening to it has been dulled by three centuries of neglect."

Zeus: Yes, ... true enough, ... there seems to be growing talk about the need for us to return the tacit to its natural primacy. The words of David Bohm come back to mind in this respect, from Wholeness and the Implicate Order', in his chapter on 'Consciousness and the Implicate Order'; "In this chapter, we have, however, shown in some detail that matter as a whole can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicit[e] order is the immediate and primary actuality [ontogenetic experience] (while the explicit[e] order can be derived as a particular, distinguished case of the implicit[e] order.", .... which seems to be the same as saying that 'outer-space' is a special case of 'inner-space', .... or 'curved-space' a special case of 'flat space', a scientific argument for reversing the current primacy of outer-space over inner-space.

Emile: ... And Nonaka and Takeuchi, in 'The Knowledge Creating Company' come back to this same inversion theme, that tacit understanding contains explicit knowing as a limited special case, and they cite Wittgenstein, to begin with; "... as Wittgenstein argued, 'The grammar of the word 'knows' is evidently closely related to that of 'can,' 'is able to'. But also closely related to that of 'understands.' But there is also THIS use of the word 'to know': we say 'Now I know!' --- similarly 'Now I can do it!' and 'Now I understand'." These authors suggested that this concept was invisible to most westerners, while readily visible to Japanese because of the three distinctions in their intellectual traditions; "... (1) oneness of humanity and nature: (2) oneness of body and mind; and (3) oneness of self and other. These traits have formed the foundation of the Japanese view toward knowledge as well as the Japanese approach towards management practice."

Zeus: I would remind you, though, Emile, .. that you yourself have made the point that while Johannes Kepler did indeed speak to this same geometry of 'intuitive intellection' or tacit understanding being the mother of 'ratiocinative intellection' or explicit knowledge, ... nobody paid any attention, .. and it was back in 1618, almost four hundred years ago when he wrote Harmonia Mundi.

Emile: ... fewer rabbits, more grasslands, in those times, I guess, ... if you don't feel the limits of the carpet encroaching on you, it's not the same story, ... you're not as likely to 'tune' to the 'wonder' of your circumstance. Today, it's a lot different, and I think people are truly getting ticked off about the rising dominance of parasitic behaviors in our society. I'd say that the sourcing geometry of dysfunction is creeping into the awareness of the global community.

Zeus: These geometries which we've been speaking about, do indeed seem a useful way of looking at things, ... at the way we perceive and think, ... and link us in with the models that Vygotsky and Laborit and others spent their lives working on and trying to share with us. You talk about this geometry 'creeping in' to our awareness, ... but why do you think it is that we have resisted these geometric ideas for so long and persist in keeping them out of our educational processes?

Emile: That's a good question. In my opinion, one reason is that the dominant and pervasive teaching of Euclidian or 'flatspace' geometry in our educational system, in which we imply by saying nothing, that Euclidian flatspace is an adequate base for containing our thinking on other geometries we may need to understand, ... is a key blocker, because while you can start from curved-space geometry and get to rectangular geometry, there's not way to make that trip in reverse, .... and we're back to Giogio's papa's adage, ... 'the hardest thing in the world is to teach someone something they don't know'. We definitely used to know it, however, as all the Celtic and aboriginal laments of our state of mind today, are witness to. Anyhow, in a more technical sense, the english physicist David Peat speaks around the edges of this issue in one of his web essays. He says;

"This whole question of the formal strategies employed by the brain is the province of cognitive psychology. One of the pioneers in that field was Jean Piaget. Piaget's particular approach was to suggest that the basis of our thought and action could be traced to the logic of the various physical transactions we had with the world during our first weeks, months and years. Piaget believed that these same logical operations are also present in mathematics and, in this respect, he had a very interesting point to make. It is well known, he pointed out, that mathematics can be arranged in a hierarchical structure of greater and greater depth. In the case of geometry, for example, the top, and most superficial, level is occupied by those semi-empirical rules for surveying and calculating shapes that were known to the Egyptians and Babylonians. Below that could be placed the more fundamental, axiomatic methods of the ancient Greeks. The history of geometry demonstrates the discovery of deeper and more general levels, Euclidian geometry gives way to non-Euclidian, beneath geometry is topology, and topology itself is founded on even more general and beautiful mathematics. The longer a particular topic has been studied, the deeper mathematicians are able to move towards its foundations.

But Piaget, pointed out, this historical evolution is a direct reversal of the actual development of concepts of space in the infant. To the young child, the distinction between intersecting and non-intersecting figures is more immediate than between, say, a triangle, square and circle. To the infant's developing mind, topology comes before geometry. In general, deeper and more fundamental logical operations are developed earlier than more specific rules and applications. The history of mathematics, which is generally taken as a process of moving towards deeper and more general levels of thought, could also be thought of as a process of excavation which attempts to uncover the earliest operations of thought in infancy. According to this argument, the very first operations exist at a pre-conscious level so that the more fundamental a logical operation happens to be, the earlier it was developed by the infant and the deeper it has become buried in the mind. Again, this suggests a reason why mathematics is so unreasonably effective, for the deeper it goes the more it becomes a formal expression of the ways in which we interact with, and learn about, the world. "

Zeus: Wow, ... so many things are telling us that we must re-learn how to experience the world as we used to experience it, .... with a child's wonder, ... how does that song of Luce Dufault's go? ... 'Laissez-Nous La Chance';

Le monde qu'on veut n'est pas qu'un reve (The world we want is but a dream)

Suffirait que les fusils se taisent (It would suffice to silence the guns,)

Retrouvons notre coeur d'enfant (.. To rediscover our 'child's' heart,)

Le droit aux sourires desarmants (.. The right to disarming smiles)

Laissez-nous la chance (Let us have the chance)

De tout rebatir (To rebuild everything)

Laissez-nous nos reves (Let us have our dreams)

Nos eclats de rire (Our outbursts of laughter)

Je veux re-apprendre (I want to re-learn how)

A perdre mon temps (To lose my sense of time)

Il faudrait donner (We must give)

Le pouvoir aux enfants (The power to the child)

Il y a tant d'amour emprisonne (There is so much love imprisoned in us)

Qui reve encore de liberte (Which dreams of being freed)

Sur tous les chemins de l'enfance (Along all the pathways of childhood)

Laissons la place a l'innocence (Make a space for innocence)

Emile: Yes, the child in each of us knows the topology of dreams, ... the inner-space dreamscape which we must incubate into a harmonious reality, ... and that is being hindered rather than helped by a passive and detached voyeur focus, ... by our being parasites of outer-space actualities.

Zeus: ... I'm definitely with the Brazilians on this one, ... down with outer-space parasitism, and viva the harmonic incubation of inner-space latencies, ....

..... "When we dream alone, it is only a dream. When we dream together, it is no longer a dream but the beginning of reality."

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