Embodying the world -- the search for radical coherence?

Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects (Part #10)

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The "pattern that connects" can indeed be understood as an imposed reality -- a subtle "de-scription" of collective reality to which one is obliged to sub-scribe as a player in another's script -- a trap, however delightful. But it may also be understood as a pattern that one creatively engenders -- empowered as the writer of one's own script, using one's preferred metaphors. This is consistent with the newly recognized freedom to frame God through different metaphors, to explore a variety of possible relationships (cf Sally McFague, Models of God: theology for an ecological, nuclear age, 1987). As to whether this is mere illusion, Kenneth Boulding responds:

Our consciousness of the unity of the self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of a group, organization, department, discipline, or science. If personification is only a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors - we might be one ourselves. (Ecodynamics; a new theory of societal evolution, 1978)

In this radical sense, all psychosocial constructs can be considered one's own "intellectual property" in an existential sense. They do not belong to others, except as gifted through one's own acquiescence. Of course, from their perspective and within their community, these constructs may well be understood otherwise -- if one allows for that reality in one's own script!

There is therefore a sense in which one invokes one's environment and one's world -- if not the universe itself. One can indeed choose to "be the world", sustained by a meaningful relationship to its diversity. The "pattern that connects" is then a pattern that exemplifies one's identity and through which one is expressed -- hence the title of the book by Gregory Bateson through which the phrase was introduced: Mind and Nature: a necessary unity (1979). The "divine marriage", following the various forms of one's engagement (noted above), then engenders a world -- a world that one embodies oneself.

However there is a dynamic implicit in this description. It is not a static condition. The "moving finger" continues to write and -- as with breathing -- new insights inspire and refresh, before being allowed to expire to leave place for the even newer. Substance is given to the reality of an "other" before that significance is withdrawn -- even "sacrificed".

One approach to understanding the "lost language" of pattern-shifting in such a process reality can be obtained from insights into the 4,000 year-old chanted hymns of the Rg Veda of the Indian tradition (as discussed elsewhere). A very powerful exploration of this work by a philosopher, Antonio de Nicolas, using the non-Boolean logic of quantum mechanics, opens up valuable approaches to integration. The unique feature of the approach is that it is grounded in tone and the shifting relationships between tone. It is through the pattern of musical tones that the significance of the Rg Veda is to be found:

Therefore, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, we have to be aware that we are dealing with a language where tonal and arithmetical relations establish the epistemological invariances... Language grounded in music is grounded thereby on context dependency; any tone can have any possible relation to other tones, and the shift from one tone to another, which alone makes melody possible, is a shift in perspective which the singer himself embodies. Any perspective (tone) must be "sacrificed" for a new one to come into being; the song is a radical activity which requires innovation while maintaining continuity, and the "world" is the creation of the singer, who shares its dimensions with the song. (Antonio de Nicolas, Meditations through the Rg Veda, 1978, p. 57)

Through such processes, there is not only a dance between the creative capacities of a multiplicity of communities, but also in the changing degree to which one gives weight and substance to such externalities in one's script. It is these processes that engender the future -- perhaps to be understood as an "open source future", collectively constructed as with "open source software". Such an "open source future" is to be contrasted with efforts to get everyone "singing from the same hymn sheet" in subscribing to what might be termed a single-standard "microsoft future" (cf Eric S. Raymond, Cathedral and the Bazaar). In an "open source future", everyone has the opportunity to be "Bill Gates" !

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