Implications of question configuration in practice

Now as the Ultimate Cognitive Strange Attractor (Part #10)

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• the quest for feeling alive "now" recalls the symbolism (discussed in the main paper) of the quest for any pearl of truth or the Holy Grail, also explored separately in relation to cognitive catastrophes (Interrelating Cognitive Catastrophes in a Grail-chalice Proto-model: implications of WH-questions for self-reflexivity and dialogue, 2006). The associated symbolism of the chalice also merits consideration (In-forming the Chalice as an Integrative Cognitive Dynamic: sustaining the Holy Grail of global governance, 2011)
  
  
• challenges of governance are highlighted by the skills coordinated in the moment in the practice of extreme sports, as suggested with respect to the martial arts (Ensuring Strategic Resilience through Haiku Patterns: reframing the scope of the "martial arts" in response to strategic threats, 2006).
  
  
• preoccupation with sustainability merits exploration in terms of the dynamic associated with "now" and the potential loss of associated potential -- heralding collapse. This challenges:
  • the current emphasis on understandings of sustainabilty which depend primarily on growth (as in any Ponzi scheme), potentially to be caricatured by the attributes of aphrodisiacs (sustaining permanent "economic orgasm" and mitigating against "political erectile dysfunction").
  • the implicit tendency to envisage sustainability as primarily designed to favour human reproduction -- as the primary guarantee of permanent growth
  • the current framings of immortality, in the absence of any consideration of the "feeling alive" it might hope to sustain.
    
    
• the pattern of questions active in the moment, and thereby framing "now", can also be understood in terms of ensuring focus -- the forms of concentration necessary in extreme sports, for example. The experience of "feeling alive" then bears some resemblance to engaging in a cognitive dynamic usefully described by such terms as roiling and writhing. Some remarkable pointers to the achievement of such focus -- and of sustaining it -- are offered by the challenges of governing the dynamics of plasma (controlling the "snake") in a toroidal nuclear fusion reactor, as argued separately (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006)
  
  
• the curiously paradoxical role of emptiness and nothingness as characterizing a central point of reference. This suggests a poorly recognized relationship between the importance of nothing to (astro)physics, the existential nothingness characteristic of depression and despair, and the mystic preoccupation with emptiness (Emerging Significance of Nothing, 2012; Import of Nothingness and Emptiness through Happening and Mattering, 2008; Paradoxes of Engaging with the Ultimate in any Guise: living life penultimately, 2012). The argument is well-made in the following quatrain by the polymath Omar Khayyám, as the famed author of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

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