It's Elemental

Tag: Sorts

  • Patterns in Process: Transdisciplinarity as a Background for Working with the Elemental Cycle of Transformation

    Patterns in Process: Transdisciplinarity as a Background for Working with the Elemental Cycle of Transformation

    Elemental Cycle Abstract

    This essay outlines connections between the Elemental Cycle as an archetype of transformation, transdisciplinarity, and  cybernetics.  A number of questions are addressed: the nature and importance of connecting these fields, an examination of resources and the dominant disciplinary discourses for the associated fields, and a critical examination of my assumptions, beliefs, and position.

    Introduction

    How often do we find ourselves in a position of not being able to see something unless it is first pointed out to us?  This happens all the time with the visual and other physical senses, but of course also occurs in our thinking; certain concepts seem to hide in plain sight, and unless we are cued into where and how to look for (or to think about) them, they slide on by as a part of the undifferentiated background of conceptual life.  Usually we are introduced to these sorts of concepts just like we are to new people, through a third party who is already familiar with each of us: “Seth, I’d like you to meet Recursion; Recursion, this is Seth.”  Often with this sort of introduction comes an experience: “Oh hello Recursion!  You know, I feel like you must hang out at some of the same coffee-shops as I do, but we’ve never been formally introduced.”  And so a relationship begins with a concept, and just as with human beings, you can become more intimate and familiar, get into fights, seek new levels of understanding, and go on adventures. (more…)

  • Organs of Perception

    Basarab Nicolescu is a physicist and proponent of transdisciplinarity.  In the book of the same name (which he edited), he speaks of multiple “levels of Reality”, which are accompanied by multiple “levels of perception”. These two complementary duals form, on the one hand, what he calls the “transdisciplinary object” and on the other the “transdisciplinary subject”.  These are united by a flow of “nonresistance to experience” he calls the sacred, which moves through all the levels.  See the picture from his book below:

    Transcendent Object/Subject and Sacred
    Transcendent Object/Subject and Sacred

    Although this view is a bit schematic, one of the things that Nicloescu includes which is often very lost in modern discussions about these sorts of things is the necessity for a corresponding “level of perception” when encountering various levels of reality.

    Specifically, this is something verifiable in my own experience: that it actually takes not just some kind of intellectual shift to see things from a new perspective, but rather the rhythmic development of new organs of perception in order to perceive new realities.  I’m speaking of ‘organs of perception’ because they are strictly analogous to real organs like our eyes and ears, but without physicality — they are, if you will, organs made ‘on the fly’ in the soul, which are capable of resolving details in a situation that otherwise would be lost.  Their constituency relies entirely upon the way in which they are themselves created — they form in the image of what they can thus perceive.  For example, a Waldorf teacher I know has developed in her contemplative work with children a soul-organ which can perceive movements of ‘warmth’ in ways that offer specific and practical information and actions regarding individuals — this is something experienced as eminently real and subtle, which would be lost on anyone who hadn’t done the same rhythmic work to create the relevant capacity for experience to hold that kind of perception.

    It seems we often expect that such perceptions should be contingent upon a primarily intellectual shift in understanding — and an understanding of outer phenomena in particular — as if it were only a question of having the right ideas about things that would allow us to perceive newly.  I think this is an error;  that kind of change is only preparation and accompaniment, but cannot fully constitute the necessary basis for actual perception of new realms.

  • poems

    here shall words arrive
    not on my lips, nor yours
    but still caressed

    a meeting of sorts
    out of sorts
    still always flowing

    an uncovering of
    of  what
    what
    will your tongue see
    your eyes hear
    our heart sing?