Enactivating the pattern that connects

Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects (Part #7)

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The above remarks may be considered far from any focus on a "vision" of the future. They have been advanced to reframe the limitations of the optical commitment to "focus" and "vision" -- notably by implicitly questioning any prematurely closed understanding of the spacetime locus of "future". Emphasis has instead been placed on connectivity -- not in a descriptive sense but rather in the sense of being able to travel the associative pathways between the islands of more definitive ways of knowing. As with the troubadour travelling between the medieval courts, how can such subtle connectivity be given credibility to those for whom the elven pathways are too fragile and risky -- perhaps to the point of insubstantiality and evanescence? How can they be offered the opportunity to move between the gated envisioning communities?

The troubadour exemplifies an aspect of the methodology celebrated in a Buddhist precept: Laying down the Path through Walking. This might be understood as an act of imagination -- possibly to be described as "magic". Francisco Varela (Laying Down a Path in Walking: essays on enactive cognition, 1997) has notably explored this process -- giving rise to the approach now termed "enactivism" (cf Francisco Varela, et al. The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience, 1991).

The enactivist approach to "laying down the path" may be usefully contrasted with a common practice of "lying about the path" one is walking -- whether to oneself or to others. Both may be contrasted with a distinction now made between "faith-based" and "reality-based" decision-making at the highest level as noted in a much-cited article by Ron Suskind (Without a Doubt, The New York Times, In The Magazine, 17 October 2004) regarding an exchange with an aide in the decision-making circle of President Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Such a perception of "laying down the path" offers an interesting insight into emerging understanding of the nature of a gated envisioning community. The view is confirmed by Gary Younge (Never mind the truth. The Guardian, 31 May 2004):

Politics has, to an extent, always been about the triumph of symbols over substance and assertion over actuality. But in the case of Iraq this trend seems to have reached its apogee, as though statements by themselves can fashion reality by the force of their own will and judgment. Declaration and proclamation have become everything. The question of whether they bear any relation to the world we actually live in seems like an unpleasant and occasionally embarrassing intrusion. The motto of the day both in Downing Street and the White House seems to be: "To say it is so is to make it so." These people are rewriting history before the ink on the first draft is even dry.

Perhaps, in contrast to such "perversions", the significance of the pattern of elven walkways has been well-identified by Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979) in making the point that:

"The pattern which connects is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.".

And it is from this perspective that he warns in a much-cited phrase: "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality." The cover of The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog (1974) carried the phrase: "We can't put it together; it is together". But, combining these understandings, it is not a question of whether the connectivity is "there". Rather it is a question of whether we can give it the meaning necessary for it to be sufficiently comprehensible to carry the quality and coherence with which we wish to be experientially associated.

As recognized down the centuries by indigenous peoples, the "pattern that connects" has to be enactivated through individual and collective engagement -- periodically, as in the case of the Australian songlines that have to be ritually "sung" to "refresh" them. As with such traditions, do the elven pathways effectively have to be sung into existence by those prepared to walk them? Is it through this process that the future is engendered? "Walking" of course offers a powerful metaphor of alternation between engagement "of the left" and "of the right" -- perhaps essential to any cognitive movement along elven pathways (cf Transdisplinarity-3 as the Emergence of Patterned Experience: transcending duality as the conceptual equivalent of learning to walk, 1994) .

The elven pathways have to be "walked" in this way to keep them alive to ourselves and to our culture. It is not they that run the risk of becoming non-existent, however, rather it is our inability to recognize their existence that endangers the quality of our own lives, our sense of identity and the survival of our own culture.

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