An inclusional worldview
ted lumley
to come
Posts by ted lumley
What is Politics Doing to Community?
0April 26, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
When God sprinkled the earth with humans or when they climbed out of clam-shells as in Haida Creation Myth, they were quickly attracted to oases, forest groves, green valleys, snug harbours and paradisiacal islands, like iron filings attracted to magnets. ‘Community’ thus evolved, in the ‘habitat-orchestrates-the-inhabitants’ manner as Nietzsche has described it; “evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow.” That is; the dynamics of habitat orchestrate the dynamics of the inhabitants; when a tree grows tall and sprouts dates, it orchestrates tree-climbing behaviour in humans; ditto for valley corn, prairie grain, forest game and marine fisheries. (more…)
On ‘disliking’ the cultural CUSTOM of celebrating birthdays
0February 28, 2011
by ted lumley
in Ted's Blog
On my ‘dislike’ of our cultural CUSTOM of celebrating birthdays
(parties/celebrations and exchange of best wishes are great, but can’t we trigger them differently? [and avoid cyclic repetition])
just in case anyone is interested, my dislike of our custom of celebrating birthdays is explained as follows. (more…)
Rant
3February 27, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
expression unencumbered by word-based language
My feeling is that a ‘true rant’ should spontaneously emerge, like the howling of coyotes orchestrated by the rising of a full moon.
But I have lost my coyote voice and coyote ways so I feel as if I am stuck with language.
Language is a poor vehicle for my rant because it divides everything up into subject and object and then has to set everything in motion using verbs. My experience of the world is nothing like the way it is served up in language. The world of my experience is an innovatively unfolding spatial-relational continuum, a ‘flow of becoming’ that includes me. (more…)
Pender Island or Pirate Island?
0February 25, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.
Musings on the globally pervasive quest for ‘more personal’ community: . . .- It seems that many people have grown tired of living within a system that is ‘constantly bickering with itself’ and seems, in many ways, to be growing more ‘internally intolerant’. The discomfort is not coming simply from differences in views and their associated debates, since these have always been accepted as part of normal living and the normal social dynamic. It seems instead to be coming from the growing un-civility of it all. We may applaud the significant extension to our ability to communicate furnished by cell phones and internet technologies, but these technologies open the door, as well, to an extreme impersonality [e.g. ‘bullying’ that exposes the private life details of an individual to a voyeur crowd that can easily exceed the capacity of the Coliseum] and to the infusing of discordant notes that continually accumulate and never seem to get resolved, engendering a lingering ambiance that is sort of graffiti like. In the new media, many speak in abusive and derogatory tones that ‘would not be tolerated in a physical space’. At the same time, the boundarylessness opens the way for new connections that have the potential to bring people together in a ‘more personal’ community.
What kind of change is in its birthing process? (more…)
Transcending Science and Religion (Transcending Theory)
0February 18, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
Viewing a life-cycle removes the ecological (conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational) dimensionality
‘Theory’ is a way of understanding how the world works which in turn shapes our behaviour and how we relate to and engage with one another and with our shared living space.
‘Theory’ can be either religious or scientific and the theories of our culture are infused into us early on in our lives. As B. F. Skinner observes; “Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.”. That is why children who grow up in a culture that embraces particular religious theories (God created nature in the form of a collection of local material beings) and scientific theories (the earth occupies the centre of the universe) tend to believe in the same theories, and to infuse into their children at an early age, these same theories. As in the examples in parentheses, there tends to be overlap in these religious and scientific theories; e.g. the ‘absolute being’ of ‘local material bodies’. Since the world is evidently ‘evolving’, there have been different religious and scientific theories that try to reconcile a world undergoing continual ‘becoming’ and a world portrayed in terms of a ‘collection of material beings’. (more…)
How Rational Thought is Screwing Up Our Understanding
1February 6, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
This essay is for sharing with those who may have interest in the intuition that rational thought is screwing up our understanding by ‘going with vision, thought and language’ rather than with our ‘feeling experience’ of situational inclusion in the unfolding spatial plenum.
.
escher's 'print gallery' / including the observer in the observed
Rational thought turns us into judges that accept, LITERALLY, the forms we see ‘out there in front us’ and ‘their actions’ as if we were ‘not included’ in what we are looking at ‘out there in front of us’. Thus an oppressive regime that allows extreme wealthy and poor classes to form (protects the continuing disparate wealth shift by ‘right to own and possess’ laws, sees ‘theft’, the inevitable ‘short circuits’ that develop between such extremes, as actions in-their-own-local-right perpetrated by forms or ‘beings’ that exist in their own local right. This notion that ‘local forms’ and their actions are ‘real’ is something that we gather from our visual sensing and that we further affirm in thought and language by defining and word-labeling these forms. As John Stuart Mill observed; “Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the local existence of the object [form] defined.” (more…)
The Elusive Source of Social Discontent: Our Identity
0January 1, 2011
by ted lumley
in APN
friedrich wilhelm nietzsche (ca. 1875)
Many people are discontented with modern society and some are very angry. The discontent and anger seeks to point the finger somewhere, … at ‘big oil’, at capitalism, at the corporation, at the state, and at ‘authority’ in general.
It is not going to go away without being dealt with. The discontent and anger is going to continue to deepen until some sort of resolving insight is forthcoming.
The discontent is in me and I often speak the language of anti-authoritarianism or anarchism in trying to address it.
My views are better-described, though, in terms of ‘decolonizing’ as in Amerindian ‘decolonizing’ initiatives. They are about restoring more natural relations with one another and our living space. This, I do not see simply as a ‘good thing to do’. I see it as an imperative in the sense that we are suffering from a malady that is only going to get worse, if it is not attended to. The result will be deepening tensions and conflict between those who are the supporters and defenders of our ‘current way of life’ and the growing number of people who emotionally and intellectually reject it and who try to actively, physically reject it, a task that is extremely frustrating since one is included in it like a fish in water.
My intention is not to ‘change the world’ so as to bring about some Utopian society. It is to cultivate collective inquiry into the psycho-social foundations of our society so that we can all see through to the bottom of this; so that we can expose, for ourselves, the malady that is not going to go away unless we acknowledge that it is there, and which is going to get a lot worse if left unattended. (more…)
From Incoherence to Harmony
0December 8, 2010
by ted lumley
in APN
A small plane runs out of fuel and attempts a landing on a busy freeway, the drivers in the freeway flow see the plane descending and open up a space for it to land. As the wind shifts, shifting the plane’s imminent point of ground contact, the organizing of the opening in the vehicle collective shifts, leaving an impression akin to that of an eagle herding cats, a phenomenon ‘half seen’ and ‘half felt’ as the ‘cat’s paw’ is to the sailor, an approaching ‘dark patch’ on the water that warns of imminent engaging with an invisible gyre of air turbulence.
We live in a dynamic space and our actions/behaviours in the unfolding present are naturally orchestrated by the continually transforming spatial relations we are uniquely, situationally included in. We experience the world as a ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial-relational dynamic. Everything is in flux, and within the evolving flux, certain forms gather, persist for some time (we call this a ‘life-cycle’) and are re-gathered into the flux.
An observer who sees the plane land safely will report that; … “the drivers on the freeway moved aside so as to ‘clear a path’ for the plane to land”, … making the driver’s action sound very ‘rational’ and ‘deliberate’ as if the organization immanent in their collective behaviour had been calculated and executed by them, rather than being a manifestation of their; … “putting their behaviour in the service of sustaining spatial-relational harmony in the continually unfolding now”.
If one wishes to understand ‘organization’ in the social dynamic and/or in nature in general, one must acknowledge two different interpretations of the ‘source of organization’ in this unfolding where the freeway drivers opened up a clear space for the plane to land; (more…)
Rehabilitating Our ‘/’ Chameleon
0November 17, 2010
by ted lumley
in APN
Theuth, the chameleon-God, is the ‘/’ between death/life, light/dark, logos/mythos
[N.B. For reading either before or after reading this essay, see the broader context-giving introduction. ]
The source of global social dysfunction, that is pointed to by all of my investigations, lies in our interpretation of this ‘/’, this ‘back-stretched connexion’ wherein we give meaning to conjugate relations such as habitat/inhabitant. That is, we can understand the ‘/’ in two different ways (a) simple something/nothing binary opposites, and/or, (b) spatially nested inclusion. (more…)
Cosmology for Kids. Volume I, No. 1
1November 11, 2010
by ted lumley
in Ted's Blog
Cosmology for Kids Volume I, No. 1
natural curiousity suppressed by cultural imprinting?
Preface/Introduction:
I would be happy if my grandchildren and all of the children of the rising generations, would have good access to hearing about ‘another worldview’, ‘another way of understanding’ and ‘another way of carrying oneself in the world dynamic’. The crowd that inhabits the surface of the earth has more staying power than people it is composed of, who rise up into it, stay for a while, then decline and are regathered within nature. This ‘crowd dynamic’ is not something each new generation is the causal producer of. We come in as innocents in the manner that one enters into a skipping rope, if you don’t get your behaviour attuned to what is already going on, you will be ‘run over’ by a truck, not just a rope. (more…)
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