‘Aboriginal Physics’connotes our pre-Enlightenment/Medieval understanding of the ceaselessly unfolding ‘fluid’ world in which we formerly saw ourselves and all things as being included.  The Enlightenment brought with it a different way of ‘seeing’ things — ‘seeing’ the world not by the flow itself, but by way of ‘representations’ that ‘froze” the flowing dynamical forms of nature; representations such as maps, diagrams and later ‘photographs’, whereas aboriginal or medieval ‘physics’ – an implicit rather than explicit field of study – saw ‘dynamics’ as a fluid-unfolding wherein the persisting patterns-in-the-flow were not yet given static ‘local’ form as frozen ‘representations’.  A storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere in medieval times was still ‘seen’ in terms of ‘the flow that was always there’ that spawned ‘swirlings’ within itself, while in Enlightenment representation, the same storm-cell came to be ‘seen’ as a ‘local system’ with ‘its own local agency’.

Something radical happened to our manner of ‘seeing’ and understanding in the transition from the Aboriginal/Medieval worldview to the Enlightenment worldview, the notional ‘parentage’ of ’cause’ and ‘result’ was inverted.   In our ‘Enlightenment’ way of ‘seeing’, changes in the habitat are understood as being ’caused’ by the actions and interactions of ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems (the ‘inhabitants’), but in the Aboriginal/Medieval way of ‘seeing’, the APPARENTLY ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems  (‘inhabitants’) were understood as being both animated by, and created by, the changes in the habitat.  Today, many people would say that ‘storm-cells’ in the flow of the atmosphere ‘stir up’ (’cause’ change in the flow of) the atmosphere, but the fact is that it is the changes in the flow that not only animate the behaviour of the included cells, but create those cells.   Similarly, we may see the Colorado river as the cause of that huge ‘irregularity’ in the terrain we call the ‘Grand Canyon’, but the fact is that the Colorado river, like any other river, is the ‘result’ of irregularities in the terrain, … and we may see the trouble-makers in the streets of Paris in the summer of 1789 as the cause of irregularities in the social terrain, but the fact is that the trouble-makers were the ‘result’ of irregularities in the social terrain.

This inversion in the direction of sourcing or  ‘parental relation’ of habitat-dynamics and inhabitant-dynamics, accompanied by the reduction of the reciprocal habitat-inhabitat relation to a one-sided inhabitant-causal view, has permeated Western Enlightenment-perception generally.

That is, Enlightenment physics constructed its notion of ‘dynamics’ on the back of its ‘representations’, ‘housing them’ not in a ceaseless, innovatively-unfolding ‘flow’ but instead, in a notional ‘absolute, fixed and empty (Euclidian) space where ‘change’ is rendered in terms of the actions/interactions of ‘local objects/organisms/systems’; i.e. in terms of ‘representations’ of the naturally occurring flow-features.  Having so thoroughly infused these ‘representation’ based dynamics into our Enlightment psyches, our ability to return to ‘seeing’ dynamics in a natural ‘flow-form’ manner has become extremely difficult.   Yet to do so lends great power to the resolving of today’s most troublesome issues, which are often the product of the Enlightenment view of dynamics.

Modern physics; relativity and quantum wave dynamics, takes us full circle, out of the world view in terms of Enlightenment ‘representations’ and back to a worldview in terms of ‘thingless connectedness’ (energy-field-flow), a world of innate ‘interdependence’ of all things with all things (as with ‘gravity’), where matter is energy resonance and space is not the empty container of Enlightenment thinking, but the energy-field flow itself, whose flow-forms that are continuously gathering and re-gathering, are what is ‘really beneath’ those Enlightenment ‘representations’; i.e. the static-pattern extracting maps, drawings and photographs that are, for our convenience, substituted for the dynamical features in the flow.

Still, however easy it was for us to shift our primary view of ‘reality’ from fluid forms to static ‘representations’ in terms of stand-alone ‘local objects’, it is not so easy to shift back, from ‘representations’ to ‘flow’.  That, meanwhile, is the focus of this ‘Aboriginal Physics Newsletter/Blog.  Each newsletter will examine a current ‘social issue’ from the point of view of how it can be ‘seen’ and ‘understood’ in a world of flow.

One of the troubling ‘fallouts’ of the Enlightenment shift to portraying dynamics in terms of ‘representations’ is that (habitat-inhabitant) ‘spatial-relations’ become invisible, as when we talk about storm-cells moving from here to there and doing this or that, as if they really were ‘local objects with their own local agency’ rather than features in a continuously unifying/unfolding fluid-dynamic.   Rendering the world dynamic in terms of ‘representations’ facilitates discourse (since ‘representations’ are foundational elements in language) but when such ‘idealisation’ is confused for ‘reality’, the notion arises that nature and society can be ‘controlled’ by man (when all he ‘really’ has control over is his own ‘representations’).

The word ‘control’ is not something that associates with nature’s self-organising processes.  Medieval/aboriginal communities gathered in the manner that ants gather around drops of honey or desert nomads gather around oases.  The continuous (transgenerational) inflow and outflow, which sprouts communities like wild desert flowers, presents the observing eye with persisting ‘apparently local’ patterns which are inherently dynamic but which are amenable to static ‘representation’.    The spatial-relational flow that lies at the heart of this self-organising community is lost in the effective ‘reduction’ to ‘representation’.

Representations are made of the community (maps), the dwellings (drawings) and the people (photographs) and Enlightenment man deceives himself by thinking he can be in control and put together communities where, when and as he chooses to.   Local chiefs, whose power of leadership derived from their attunement with the spirit of ‘self-organisation’, were undercut by the Enlightenment notion of centralized (power along radial lines of sight) ‘representative government’.  (When the ‘map’, backed up by a large army, showed that they were inside of the newly defined boundaries of a centrally governed state, their conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation as an organising influence had to go).  Thus, deliberate controlling action based on a combination of rational vision, mission, values, and ‘representations’ took over as the dominant mode of organisation, eclipsing the ‘self-organization induced by a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation.

When the dynamics of habitat are no longer ‘seen’ as the source of ‘organisation’ of the ‘inhabitants’ so that the clusters of dwellings and the flow-through of generations of inhabitants that we once called ‘communities’ can be reduced to ‘representations’, local  independently-existing objects called ‘communities’, ‘houses’ and ‘people’, then we are NOTIONALLY in control (i.e. we are not in control of ‘dynamical forms-in-the-flow’ but only ‘in control’ of ‘representations’ of dynamical forms).   And since we impute to these ‘representations’ of ‘community’ their own ‘local agency’ we can plunk them down anywhere (as with indians in land ‘reserves’), their own local agency now having to substitute for their medieval/aboriginal conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation or their ‘flow-feature in the flow’ nature.

Western thinking, in mainstream science, medicine, politics, sociology and even religion, is fully ensconced in the Enlightenment reducing of flow-forms to static ‘representations’, giving rise to incoherence and widespread social dysfunction.  The Aboriginal Physics Newsletter will select current issues and review them in the light of how Enlightenment representation leads us into irresolvable paradox and inhibits our ability to resolve such issues, inviting comments and dialogue that can help to improve the clarity of what is going on, and strengthen our ability to deal with it.

The ‘inversion’ that has taken place in the way we see things, that we need to re-invert so that we can see things as we used to in our Aboriginal/Medieval mode, is radical and subtle.  The first Aboriginal Physics Newletter addresses the Western medical model, where this inversion in how we ‘see things’ has cropped up before, in the work of Pasteur and Béchamp, work that will be frequently cited in these newsletters.  Their view was that that ‘terrain-dynamics’ or ‘habitat-dynamics’ were the source of the ‘inhabitant dynamics’, thus the view that the proliferation of microbes was the result, rather than the ’cause’ of illness (‘illness’ being changes [unbalancing] in the terrain).  Furthermore, their view was that the microbes were not only animated by changes in the terrain but were created by them, as parallels the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation of storm-cell and flow.  This ‘inverted’ way of seeing dynamics, which flipped the mothering source to the habitat, was seriously received by medical professionals in the first part of the twentieth century as can be seen in books such as ‘Béchamp or Pasteur’ by E. Douglas Hume.   However, Enlightenment representation, the basis for ‘seeing’ in terms of the inhabitant-dynamics being the parent of habitat-dynamics,  is woven into the fabric of our everday lives and the resistance to re-inversion is enormous. é

* * *

Newletter Epilogues:  Author’s Subtext . . .  APN #___

A review of the ‘author’s subtext’ (comparable to the ‘producer’s subtext’ in the ‘special features on a DVD)  follows immediately after each issue of the Aboriginal Physics Newsletter (preceding open commentary), authored by one or more of the small circle of ‘inclusionality-researchers’ who have been working for some time on overcoming the major obstacles in articulating the ‘flow view’.  That is, the ‘author’s subtext’ review will not be a critique of Newsletter content per se but will address the perceived shortfalls or strengths in capturing the difference between the ‘Enlightenment view’ and the Aboriginal/Medieval ‘flow view’.

Open comments are invited on either content or ‘author’s subtext’.