Living "outside-inside": embodying the dream

Annexing the World as the Deal of the Century (Part #9)

Embodying the dream: Arguments of a range of authors can be presented for the transformation of worldview from "inside-outside" to "outside-inside", with reality to be recognized as being as much "inside" as "outside" (World Introversion through Paracycling: global potential for living sustainably "outside-inside", 2013; Existential Embodiment of Externalities: radical cognitive engagement with environmental categories and disciplines, 2009). This can be explored as an analogue to the interface challenge of form of of osmosis (Cognitive Osmosis in a Knowledge-based Civilization; interface challenge of inside-outside, insight-outsight, information-outformation, 2017).

Notable in such arguments are the theories of constructivism in philosophy and theology, and in the philosophy of education. More radical are the arguments for enactivism whereby the world is enacted -- succinctly expressed through the metaphor of "laying down a path in walking" (Francisco Varela, Laying Down a Path in Walking: essays on enactive cognition, 1997). This can be expressed otherwise in aesthetic terms (Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2006).

Especially intriguing is the scope for embodying cognitively the totality of experience otherwise framed as external (Psychosocial Implication of Without Within: enjoying going solar for oneself, 2013; ) Being the Universe: a metaphoric frontier, 1999; Towards an Astrophysics of the Knowledge Universe: from astronautics to noonautics? 2006)

Provocatively and succinctly framed, this possibility follows from the innovative Renaissance insights of Marsilio Ficino regarding the "planets within" (Composing the Present Moment: celebrating the insights of Marsilio Ficino interpreted by Thomas Moore, 2001). It is also potentially consistent with the work of Joseph Campbell (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: metaphor as myth and as religion, 1986) and of ecophilosopher Henryk Skolimowski (The Participatory Mind: a new theory of knowledge and of the universe, 1994). The argument has many affinities with Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

The possibility has previously been explored otherwise (En-joying the World through En-joying Oneself: eliciting the potential of globalization through cognitive radicalization, 2011; World Introversion through Paracycling: global potential for living sustainably "outside-inside", 2013; Personal Globalization, 2001; Existential Embodiment of Externalities: radical cognitive engagement with environmental categories and disciplines, 2009; Degrees of Cognitive Engagement with Interrelated Global Categories, 2009). The latter document relates the approach to a range of specific issues in the global problematique: hunger, pollution, disease, unemployment, etc.

Enacting the dream? Whilst it is indeed possible to orchestrate such dreams as a "dramaturge", even more intriguing are the opportunities to enact them through designing oneself into the dream in some way. Each is free to dream of their ideal home as a personal "Jerusalem" -- even elaborating that dream as "Heaven on Earth", with all its ideal subtleties.

Given the complex subtlety of physical reality now indicated by fundamental physics, where might "Jerusalem" be and what indeed is it? Might "it" be better understood as a dynamic rather in the static structural terms by which a city is typically imagined?

As indicated above, and however one chooses to name it, it can be fruitfully understood as a singularity whose nature is a fundamental challenge to comprehension (Jerusalem as a Symbolic Singularity: comprehending the dynamics of hyperreality as a challenge to conventional two-state reality, 2017). This challenge is potentially consistent with the theology of mysticism (Mathematical Theology: Future Science of Confidence in Belief, 2011).

Understood in this way, each is free to reframe themselves as a "Zionist" in some way -- whatever the label (Generic Reframing of the 12 Tribes of "Israel": "We have met the Zionists and them is us", 2009). Even more specifically, and however "manipulative", each is free to recognize their own systemic role in the dream as a "Benjamin Netanyahu" or a "Jared Kushner" -- and why not "Mossad"? No one needs to know.

The opportunity is to coopt for one's own dream those figments defined as externalities -- in whose "existence" people are urged so strongly to believe by authorities of unquestionable legitimacy. Such externalities, in their current condition, can be readily understood as together constituting a "wreck" -- but one potentially capable of being adapted to one's own purposes, according to one's resources and ingenuity (Having Bought into a Wreck -- What Now? Cognitive challenges of embodying reality otherwise, 2018).

Both "Israel" and "Palestine" can be usefully seen as metaphors in this process of reframing arbitrary boundaries.