Existential ecostery as University of Earth: a Unistery?

Reimagining Principles Enabling an Existential Ecostery (Part #19)

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Imagining as a sustaining process: As argued here, an "existential ecostery" is a dynamic imaginative process -- of active imagining rather than the product of imagination. As with the articulation by The Ecostery Foundation, it is indeed a place of confluence in time of ecological values, knowledge and wisdom. The cognitive challenges of such a "place" in "time", draw upon the emerging insights into the nature of "spacetime" as imagined and articulated by physics -- hence the focus on the cognitive paradoxes of higher dimensionality and how they might be rendered comprehensible. How then to dwell within an ecostery -- to live as an ecostery in a world of paradox and uncertainty? (Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds: global implications of "betwixt and between" and liminality, 2011; Living with Incomprehension and Uncertainty: re-cognizing the varieties of non-comprehension and misunderstanding, 2012).

Reframing experience of spacetime: Careful attention has been given to the experiential interplay of space and time by various authors (Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: the perspective of experience, 1977; Christopher Day, Spirit and Place: healing our environment -- healing environment, 2002; Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, 1979; Barry Patterson, The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci, 2005; Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: toward a renewed understanding of the place-world, 1993 James A. Swan, The Power of Place: sacred ground in natural and human environments, 1991; Christian de Quincey, Radical Nature: rediscovering the soul of matter, 2002). Although there is a literature on the "spirit of place", "genius loci", or "psychogeography", its interpretation in terms of the dynamics of the pattern of attention it implies is less evident -- although experientially these are entangled in sustaining identity within an "ecostery".

The introduction framed the existential challenge within the current period of dramatic worldwide unemployment -- marked by increasing social unrest. It noted that official statistics make little reference to the increasing proportion of the population excluded from the "workforce" through aging and legislative measures regarding "retirement". Similarly little reference is made to the "underemployed" in the effort to provide a positive statistical spin to "employment" figures. The increasing numbers "incarcerated" (in prisons, hospices, apartments, or other facilities) are also excluded from consideration.

For all those so excluded, the question asked there remains: "what is one to do" when "there is nothing to be done"? Little imagination is devoted to how billions of people might order the pattern of their daily lives under such circumstances -- having exhausted a variety of conventional possibilities, and especially when subject to resource constraints. The question acquires other dimensions through recognition of the increasing importance of narcotics as a means of enhancing imaginative capacity in a world experienced as significantly boring.

World introversion through metaphor: The very recent recognition of the degree of invasive global surveillance, and its enabling of highly questionable local intervention, might well be reframed as indicative of some features of the argument here for "world introversion" (in contrast to the problematic outcomes of "revolution", more conventionally advocated as an alternative). As framed here, this raises the question as to whether the world could be "turned around" otherwise -- as speculatively explored previously in relation to ECHELON, as predecessor of the NSA/PRISM program (From ECHELON to NOLEHCE: enabling a strategic conversion to a faith-based global brain, 2007).

The current revelations of NSA/PRISM's unprecedented global ambition to ingest meta-data on everyone are effectively an effort to track the communication processes of the world -- effectively the "global emissions" of a virtual form (Sins of Hot Air Emission, Omission, Commission and Promission: the political challenge of responding to global crises, 2005). The ambition is so terrifyingly radical and unexpected that it justifies a case for a correspondingly radical cognitive approach on the part of the individual -- necessarily acting in virtual secrecy. This might also be understood as "terrifying", as separately explored (Thinking in Terror, 2005). Radical use of metaphor, reframing interpretation of the "external" globe, might then be compared to the PRISM quest for "meta-data" (Being the Universe: a metaphoric frontier, 1999; Enactivating Multiversal Community: hearing a pattern of voices in the global wilderness, 2012).

Possibilities of integrative insight: The NSA/PRISM program is conceptually exciting, even an inspiration, as what may prove to be the ultimate feat of human knowledge organization through the challenge of "global sensemaking" it presents to its analysts -- a many-fold development of the integrative aspirations of the Global Sensemaking network. How indeed to order and render meaningful such vast quantities of meta-data -- beyond what conventional mathematical techniques can offer? The fundamental challenge of human comprehensibility remains, however, as indicated in the arguments above. How indeed to "make sense" of it?

Whilst the possibility of "drill down" techniques is obvious, the integrative challenge of "zooming out" (for which there is not even an equivalent term) is far from resolved -- given the constraints on human cognitive capacity and the limited ability to recognize larger patterns. One possibility has been partially envisaged through inverting the "telescope" metaphor (Joel de Rosnay, The Macroscope, 1979).

Other possibilities may emerge from approaches to group symmetry of very high dimensionality -- through the mathematics of "moonshine theory" or consideration of the Mandelbrot fractal (Potential Psychosocial Significance of Monstrous Moonshine: an exceptional form of symmetry as a Rosetta stone for cognitive frameworks, 2007; Psycho-social Significance of the Mandelbrot Set: a sustainable boundary between chaos and order, 2005).

However the argument above effectively suggests another approach to "zooming out" consistent with the indications of various spiritual and other unconventional disciplines (Navigating Alternative Conceptual Realities: clues to the dynamics of enacting new paradigms through movement, 2002). The argument made is that metaphor may be a key to such reframing.

Possibilities of oversight? Especially relevant to the NSA/PRISM program as a global simulation is the manner in which the much-vaunted adequacy of "democratic oversight" (or "congressional oversight") is enabled (and is itself verified through simulation) -- given the human cognitive constraints in relation to such vast quantities of data. A number of bodies are concerned with the process, including the Parliamentary Oversight Global Task Force and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. There are many documents relating to the process (Parliamentary Oversight of Intelligence services, DCAF, 2006; Oversight and Guidance: the relevance of parliamentary oversight for the security sector, DCAF; Tools for Parliamentary Oversight: a comparative study of 88 national parliaments, IPU, 2007)

In that context, irony of the highest order is evident in the ambiguity of "oversight" -- indicative as it also is of negligence and blindspots, and of the "intelligence failure" which gave rise to 9/11.

Dreaming and dreamcatching: The argument can be reframed as embodying a dream. This is consistent with the case made from the worldview of physics by Stephen Hawking (The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: the most astounding papers of quantum physics -- and how they shook the scientific world, 2011). The theme is more deliberately articulated by Steven M. Rosen (Dreams, Death, Rebirth: a multimedia topological odyssey into alchemy's hidden dimensions, 2013). The understanding is explored otherwise by Vasily V. Nalimov (Realms of the Unconscious: the enchanted frontier, 1982) by providing a remarkable aesthetic synthesis of biological, mathematical, and linguistic manifestations of probability. The significance of dreaming is variously fundamental to the Aboriginal Dreaming, to the fantasies attractive to the young in blockbuster movies, and to the consumption of psychedelic drugs.

Curiously "Al-Qaida" can be understood as a dream, since it does not "exist" in any conventional sense of the word, as separately argued (Cultivating Global Strategic Fantasies of Choice : learnings from Islamic Al-Qaida and the Republican Tea Party movement, 2010) As noted there, the process of embodying a dream is significant to the elaboration of strategy at the highest level, indicated by the neocon strategy of governance as presented by Ron Suskind (Without a Doubt, The New York Times, In The Magazine, 17 October 2004) following an exchange he had 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."

Whether it be the Tea Party movement or Al-Qaida -- or those who articulate their nature to the wider world -- it remains unclear who are "history's actors" engaged in creating their "own reality".

Ironically, as a development of the neocon strategy, the NSA/PRISM can then be understood as both the embodiment of that dream and an effort to catch those dreaming "otherwise" -- the Al-Qaida dream. The global network of systems to collect meta-data can be understood as a desperate effort to detect dangerous dreams. It is effectively designed as the first global dreamcatcher. The greater irony is that the dreams of physicists are potentially far more radical and dangerous than those of Al-Qaida -- in their disruptive reframing of understanding of conventional reality. What of that of Martin Luther King (I Have a Dream, 1963)? Or those highlighted by Slavoj Zizek (The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 2012)?

Qualitative "meta-data": These considerations frame possibilities of reflection regarding an "existential ecostery" -- especially given implied attentiveness to any blindspot, as is characteristic of disciplines of meditation, and in the cited example of Taoist Neidan (understood as a cognitive embodiment of the globe as sensed). As a "dreamcatcher", NSA/PRISM endeavours to absorb the totality of patterns of human communication in quest of the "pattern that connects" -- Bateson's meta-pattern. It aspires to the elaboration of a "Theory of Everyone" (rather than the Theory of Everything of physics).

The possibility for the individual, however, is to engage with the totality of the globe as sensed through meaningful dynamic patterns of qualities -- qualitative meta-data articulated through metaphor (values, deities, gears, etc). This is the meta-pattern which an individual might embody, as speculatively explored (Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2006; Everything as a Metaphorical Theory of Everything, 2012).

Cognitively engendering a University of Earth: As a process of cognitive "world introversion", the significance of the globe then constitutes a form of University of Earth -- sustained for the individual as an existential ecostery, paradoxically "located" in spacetime.

Given the original contrast made between "ecostery" and "monastery", this suggests a degree of consideration for "unistery" -- as a new form of dreaming.

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