Enlivening psychoactive engagement

Warp and Weft of Future Governance (Part #8)

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In her magnificent review of the Steiner-Gebser-Wilber trilogy, Jennifer Gidley (The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: an integration of integral views. Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Research and Praxis, 2007) gives focus to her intention in the following terms:

... the intent of my own integrality is not so much in detailing and mapping integral concepts -- which Wilber has done so extensively -- rather to enliven them. I hope to nurture and transpare the living imaginations of the Zeitgeist shining through the concepts of integral awakening in our time.

Again this points to the need for additional rows in Fig. 1, relating not only to the issue of comprehension but to the manner in which the columns are enlivening and enactivating -- or not, as they are experienced by many. Gidley has a specific concern with enactivating integrality, notably by reference to Sri Aurobindo's integral project:

I have chosen to focus primarily on the theoretic narratives contributed to the evolution of consciousness discourse by Steiner, Gebser and Wilber. In this way, I am enacting a conscious bias, by privileging narratives that have formerly been marginalized in the evolution discourse.... Furthermore, I am confident that my methodology, particularly the hermeneutic contextualization, provides a means of buffering the bias I am deliberately enacting, by making it explicit.... In the main narrative I will be enacting a narrative writing style that deliberately weaves conceptual reasoning with imagination, though from a post-rational mythopoetic rather than a pre-rational mythic stance.

With respect to the challenges of cognitive engagement, as it might relate to global governance, Gidley intimates (notably citing Gebser) that the domain of art -- or aesthetic sensibility -- may be a more fruitful starting point for the creation of a new panhuman narrative for an authentically integral-planetary consciousness. (p. 200).

In the light of explorations of enactivism as a process in the psychosocial construction of reality, this may fruitfully be related to the "pattern that connects" as highlighted by Gregory Bateson, and previously discussed (Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2006; Hyperspace Clues to the Psychology of the Pattern that Connects, 2003; Designing Cultural Rosaries and Meaning Malas to Sustain Associations within the Pattern that Connects, 2000). As stated by Bateson (Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979)

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 "threading" of beads in circlets of spiritual significance -- or their cultural importance as "worry beads" -- then implies a "meta-thread", perhaps as having been celebrated by Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas (1985).

The challenge for governance is how to embody that meta-pattern. One possibility is that the meta-pattern can be usefully mapped onto symmetrical polyhedra as a key to comprehension and mnemonic reinforcement (Topology of Valuing: psychodynamics of collective engagement with polyhedral value configurations, 2008).

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