Urban Hub 28: Stepping In to Step Out by Paul van Schaik

integralUrbanHub

Urban Hub

Stepping In to step out

a meta-pragmatic approach

Thriveable Worlds Paul van Schaik integralMENTORS

Urban Hub

Stepping In

to Step Out

Integral UrbanHub

Thriveable Worlds

28 Paul van Schaik Founder Creator

‘In fullness and Freedom A graphic series of integralMENTORS integral UrbanHub co-lab on Thriveable Cities-Worlds. Founder & Managing Editor Paul van Schaik a shape shifter that shapes shifts

“playing in the bamboo shoots of consciousness”

Urban Hub series is a Co Lab between integralMENTORS, & IntegralUrbanHub, with vS Publishing

co Lab

In order to find your way you must become lost generously lost it’s only when you are lost that you can be found by something greater than you Bayo Akomolafe

The times are urgent; let us slow down African proverb

Slowing down is thus about lingering in the places we are not used to. Seeking out new questions. Becoming accountable to more than what rests on the surface. Seeking roots. Slowing down is taking care of ghosts, hugging monsters, sharing silence, embracing the weird. If a humanist response to, say, the killing of whales or police violence urges us to do more and more to stop these phenomena, the call to slow down reminds us that we do not simply act upon the world (as if the world were external to our actions, or as if we were external to it), we are the world in its ongoing action-ing. As a result, we might come to examine our complicity in class issues and how the loss of immediate connections with the ‘wilds’ renders us moderns poor spokespeople for the wellbeing of the nonhuman. Bayo Akomolafe

The way we ‘see’ the world, the world ‘is’

Context Stepping In: Integral Mutation Jean Gebser; Jeremy Johnson; Cynthia Bourgeauly; P.J. Saher Bayo Akomolafe; Tyson Yunkporta Stepping out:

Content

Integrating view Towards an ecological epoch Outer views: Critical Zone Terra Forma Nature X Humanity; Material ecology Ancestors consciousness: Magic Mythic: Searching meaning African & Yoruba Australian Aboriginal Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) American Annex 1: Annex 2:

Others kosmologies ECIAPSE not a 4 letter world

Bibliography: Biographies: Books:

Urban Hub series

Context

What is this series? A collection of visions, ideas, theories, actions, dreams, etc. that give rise to a taste of the many possibilities in our world.(s) How we use all the best elements of the many worldviews, future, present and ancient, visible and those still hidden, together and in collaboration, will define how successful we are. It is the morphogenetic pull of love and caring that will determine how we succeed as a human race. It is the ability and need to generate an equitable, fair, resilient and regenerative ‘society’ that must drive us forward. The means will be a combination of many of the ideas showcased here but many more still to be discovered on our exciting journey into the future. Held together through an Integral and transparent approach.

In the desire to be collaborative, don’t forget leadership. Don’t be embarrassed to lead. There are too many efforts where it’s all about ‘getting everyone to the table.’ Everyone goes away feeling good, but no one’s doing anything. Frank Beal

Sharing and listening to stories, philosophies, cosmologies and metaphysical understanding of each other and through experimentation, research and archology developing theories, praxis, and activities/interventions to move towards a more caring world of people, cultures, caring for the planet and systems of which they are all part. For the past, present and future are here with us. Too little courage and we will fail – too much certainty and we will fail. But with care and collaboration we have a chance of success. Bringing forth emergent impact through innovation, enfoldment & collaborative efforts. A deeper understanding of the integral mutation will be required – this would be more than an ‘mental’ integral vision and beyond all meta-frameworks. Explore and enjoy – use as many of the ideas as possible (from the whole series) unfolding & enfolding each into an emergent whole that grows generatively. At each step testing – reformulating – regrouping – recreating. Moving beyond, participating, through share-holding, through stake-holding, to becoming thrive-holders.

People do not perceive worlds but enact them. Different mindsets bring forth different worlds.

“The creative act is seeing the future, it is seeing, sensing and feeling something that has not yet taken form. It is to be attuned with the creative energy of the cosmos. It is to become the creator. The creative act is one of solace, it is finding one’s self. A truly creative act is life changing, world building. The creative act does not need an audience, it sings alone to the stars, but it’s impact is felt everywhere. The creative act is truly courageous because it goes beyond the known. The creator is a world bridger, who penetrates the invisible and bring it into form. The creative act is one of deep mystery, for its methodology can never be planned, its appearance does not come by force, only receptivity, and its outcome can never be predetermined. The purely creative act is a sacred act, whose purpose is to lift up the soul of all beings.” Rachel Garrard

©Rachel Garrard

Ever Present

Walking in the world not talking of the world No one vision is sufficient in and of itself – visions can guide but only by collaborative action in a creative generative process can visions grow and become part of an ongoing positive sociocultural reality. Without taking into account the many worldviews that currently co-exist and crafting ways of including them in a positive and healthy form we will continue to alienate vast sections of all communities and humankind. It is through the cultivation of healthy versions of all the different worldviews that we can attempt to move towards an equitable, regenerative and caring world living within the planetary boundaries.

Through action we will move forward – through only ongoing talk we will stagnate and fail. These curation are to be dipped into – explored and used to generate ideas and discussion.

A catalyst for collaboration and action. And most importantly grown, modified in a generative form.

For more detail of integral theory and Framework see earlier books in this series.

shape shifters who shape shifts This is a living series - any suggestions for inclusion in the next volume send to: Paul.vanschaik@integralmentors.org

Diversity of Philosophies and Worldviews It is important to re-surface many of the essences of forgotten and side-lined philosophies, kosmologies & metaphysics as well as their systems for keeping the ‘world’ in balance. How can these add to our understanding as we expand into an aperspectival Integral consciousness from the current Mental (i.e. modern, post-modern and AQAL integral) worldview This will give us the much needed diversity, to help breakdown the over-dominating worldviews currently bringing such social, cultural, personal and physical chaos, and damage we now suffering. It’s time to expand the narrow western and eastern worldviews and truly include the best ‘essences’ from ALL the past consciousness mutations - that is the ‘deep-structure’ - and exclude the ‘surface structure’ of how these manifested through the current worldviews. The ongoing transcending and desecrating of ancestral pasts needs to end. (This desecration can be seen especially in SDI & AQAL stage classifications in the Lower Left Quadrant (culture) and to a degree in the Lower Right Quadrant (Social-fit/Society) UH28 explores a few of these issues - highlighting very briefly some of these philosophies etc.. Much more research of each of these kosmologies/worldview is needed from their own perspectives and NOT from the Eurocentric perspective. “the future cannot be known without having first been self-consciously made out of the materials bequeathed to the present by its past. In the meantime, the superficial integuments of present-day reality ought not to be frozen and rationalized as some sort of timeless order ”

Stepping in

Stepping In

examples - Various

“This is how they survive. You must know this. You’re too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light, their reason, their judgements, because in the darkness there be dragons. But it isn’t true. We can prove that it isn’t true. In the dark there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark when someone has illuminated it. And who has been so close as we are right now?” black sails

Integral Mutation

Jean Gebser Jeremy Johnson Cynthia Bourgeault P. J. Saher Bayo Akomolafe Tyson Yunkaporta

a planetary culture is not a culture of the modern but a culture of yesterday, today, and tomorrow too aperspectival

entangled kosmos

asystematic

cutting edge of irruptions increasing in conscious intensity

present thinking Rhizomic irruption Rhizomes irruptions. When separated, each piece of a rhizome is capable of producing a new growth, …… integralmentors.org

Jean Gebser

Jeremy Johnson

The Ever-Present Origin : Gebser

Structures of consciousness: expanding MUTATIONS of consciousness NOT STAGES of development

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The ever-present origin: the origin before all time is the entirety of the very beginning, so too is the present the entirety of everything temporal and time-bound, including the effectual reality of all time phases: yesterday, today, tomorrow, and even the pre-temporal and timeless.

Integral4 all & time

4 dimensional 4thmutation

Mental3 to see/space 3 dimensional 3rdmutation Mythical2 to imagine

2 dimensional 2ndmutation

Magical2 to emote

1 dimensional 1stmutation

Archaic1 origin

dimensionless 1Archaic

Rigpa, Emptiness Fullness & Freedom

Magic & Mythical Unperspectival

2Mental

"Gebser's five structural mutations of consciousness (archaic, magic, mythic, mental, integral) should not be read as static stages or levels in a linear progression; they are processual transformations." 4The

ever-present origin is the source and the whole at the same time beyond time and all dimensions. It is the absolute, all structures arise within this absolute and are the relative mutations also know as: Rigpa, Dzogchen in Buddhism (the great perfection or completeness) Emptiness in Buddhism; In fullness and freedom; Tao in Taoism; etc.

www.integralmentors.org

Modern Post-Modern Meta-Modern/ Meta Frameworks Mental-integral AQAL SD etc Perspectival. 3Intergal Aperspectival

“Perspectival vision and thought confine us within spatial limitations. The positive result is a concretion of man and space; the negative result is the restriction of man to a limited segment, where he perceives only one sector of reality. Like Petrarch, who separated landscape from land, man separates from the whole only that part which his view or thinking can encompass, and forgets those sectors that lie adjacent, beyond, or even behind. Man, himself a part of the world, endows his sector of awareness with primacy; but he is, of course, only able to see the partial view. The sector is given prominence over the circle; the part outweighs the whole. As the whole cannot be approached from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superimpose the character of wholeness onto the sector, the result being the familiar ‘totality.’” Gebser

The manifestation of this mutational process should not be construed as a mere succession of events, a progress or historicized course. It is, rather, a manifestation of inherent predispositions of consciousness, now incremental, now reductive, that determine man’s specific grasp of reality throughout and beyond the epochs and civilizations. “A mere conscious illumination of these states, which are for the most part only dimly conscious, does not achieve anything,” Gebser writes, “in fact, to illuminate these states is to destroy them.” We should be mindful of this when we consider magical and mythical realities. With the unfolding of each consciousness mutation, consciousness increases in intensity; but the concept of evolution, with its continuous development, excludes this discontinuous character of mutation. The unfolding, then, is an enrichment tied, as we shall observe, to a gain in dimensionality; yet it is also an impoverishment because of the increasing remoteness from origin. (Jean Gebser)

Gebser will repeatedly attempt to get out from under the natural machinations of the categorical mind. Much of contemporary integral studies has, like the larger human potential movement and fields such as transpersonal psychology, relied predominantly on the stage-centered maps of meta-theoretical and psycho-social development to make their case for a new consciousness (with meta-thinking placed at the higher levels of these same models). While I respect these contemporary approaches and intuit they are vastly helpful in personal, therapeutic, and sometimes organizational settings, I sense they are still other modes of expressing the complexities of cultural evolution without becoming laden with what Gebser would describe as the problems of the late phase of the mental structure (the mental-rational): a spatially fixated consciousness, quantifying its flows, ultimately pinning down living reality into singular, totalizing maps. Something more like a phenomenological approach is needed, an approach likened to what William Irwin Thompson and mathematician Ralph Abraham describe as a “complex-dynamical mentality,” or Gebser’s own aperspectival. That is, a form of thinking that is processoriented, descriptive, inhabiting unbroken flows of becomings rather than segmented and linear (or even multi-linear) striations. Gebser’s methodology lies somewhere adjacent to—or between— rather than against meta-theoretical approaches such as Integral Theory, moving us from critique and response to alterity, seeking new expressions, new statements in the field of contemporary integral scholarship. As Octavia Butler said, “there are new suns.”

The integral aperspectival approach—of which there is no one, totalizing, or orienting approach, because it opens—responds to fixation by irruption, undoes rigidification by release (rather than mere fracturing or ratio), liberates constricted self-sense into the abyss. Yet the terror of the abyss is also a sky—the luminous void—for the integral human being. The aperspectival is immanent, and therefore finds itself at home with the philosophy of the future: the networks of the distributed planetization to come. The integral is friendly to the concept of the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: immanental, the aperspectival rhizome is inexhaustible, and so it springs forth, abolishing the limits of near and far, yesterday and tomorrow, yet creatively fulfilling them, actualizing the needs of the present without becoming frozen in clocktime’s segmentation. This is what might be called an integral futurism (this is not Gebser’s terminology but my own). An integral futurism is liberated from a deficient mental-rational futurism, which can only be timebound, captured by perspectival linearity, and must achieve great speed and complexity in an attempt to escape, to master, the time factor.

The integral leap implies an integration of all structures, a waring. This integration does not belong to the mental structure’s capacity for wakeful synthesis, generalization, or categorization. “A mere conscious illumination of these states, which are for the most part only dimly conscious, does not achieve anything,” Gebser writes, “in fact, to illuminate these states is to destroy them.” We should be mindful of this when we consider magical and mythical realities. When we prioritize perspectival wakefulness over unperspectival consciousness in a linear fashion of superior consciousness, there, again, is the colonization of the starry twilight worlds (and the folly of the mental is that these twilight worlds ultimately hijack the waking ego in novel ways); like lifting a rock to peer at the underworld in the light of the sun. Furthermore, to merely portray the unfoldment of the structures with the now default mentality of perspectival consciousness—in terms of gains, advancement, and progress—would be to fixate them into spatial reality (where the structures become refashioned as stages and placed higher, or lower, in a developmental ladder). process.

BEFORE WE CAN DISCERN the new, we must come to know the old. By knowing the old I actually mean something like re-constituting it. As Deleuze says, it is not enough to have the unconscious, you must produce it yourself in the present. Bringing up the structures from the depths of time, from latency, is a matter of animating them, presently, and as such must be a participatory process.

Revivification of the so-called old can be overwhelming, like how the new reality on Mount Ventoux was so disturbing for Petrarch. It is easy for us moderns to dismiss the world-ascave and write off the unperspectivity as mere superstition. Gebser, for instance, notes how Renaissance artists regarded their medieval predecessors—in a tellingly perspectival way—as having “false vision.” We hardly need to discuss the blatant scientism of our own day which seeks to explain away subjectivity itself (a form of final self-annihilation in the late mental structure). To truly integrate the structures requires more than a mere distanced appreciation of their remote accomplishments. We must come into glimmerings of contact with the so-called past and chance, as it were, a meeting with the dead. To know the night you must risk stumbling in the dark. The archaic, magic, and mythic always retain their potency in us; they are spiritually and ontologically present, challenging (and sometimes overtaking) the contemporary mental consciousness with the allurement of their alterity. The daylight mind looks with both superstition when we become present

we cultivate the capacity for openness; what “shines” forth in this openness is all that we have been and all that we will become, not merely as individuals but also in the “longer” view: the structures of consciousness, genetic and evolutionary ancestry, and cosmic being. It is through only openness and spaciousness that we can become present to these things latent in presence, and capable of coenacting the infinite and creative powers of origin. It is through this diaphaneity that we become coconscious “mutants” for the future; mutations as leaps of consciousness are done when we have moved with that which moves us into new realizations of being. In this vastness everything becomes transparent. Here everything dynamically speaks to and informs itself as it manifests both as an ego in time and a cosmic whole that wares through time. Indeed, Gebser concluded Ever Present Origin with, “in truth we ware the whole and the whole wares us.”

This immanental presence is no longer a point or a triad but the sphere. In a sphere, whether something is near or far is not a matter of distance but of attention. This is what “seeing through the world” really means for us. As we begin to face the prospect of our own extinction through the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s deep evolutionary time, it is as if the whole of who we are, have been, and could be all have come to the forefront of our consciousness and let us truly see ourselves for the first time. This mutational crisis can, we hope, be a gift and a catalyst. After all, what is the kind of self-consciousness apprehended from this long evolutionary view? Suffice to say that this intensified waring is the beginning of Teilhard’s planetization.

There is not much that can be said, or documented, about the archaic, but the nature of this structure, as Feuerstein noted, is “maximum latency,” meaning that all future mutations (magic, mythic, mental) are copresent and latent; the archaic is the latent integral, and the integral is the fully realized archaic. …… This new style of non-linear thinking places us upon a challenging precipice of thought: how might we express emergence without adhering to developmental thinking (this is not to completely denigrate the mental’s spatial emphasis, but to dislodge our own perspectival fixity)? One approach would be, as Gebser suggests, to merely loosen it a bit, displaying some degree of aperspectival freedom; simply becoming aware of our tendency to spatialize reality as we study the structures of consciousness can help this process of “mental dislodgment,” for lack of a better phrase. The unfolding of consciousness and its increasing dimensionality are, “accompanied by an increasing reification or materialization of the world,” but this is less a matter of gain or loss than a “remarkable kind of rearrangement.” It is in these turns of phrase that we really begin to see that Gebser’s approach emphasizes discontinuity and non-linear emergence, while deemphasizing linearity and a developmental view (the unfoldment of dimensionality is acknowledged but not overextended into greater significance). At the very least—in Gebser’s concept of systasis—we are pointed to something more than perspectival linearity: in this new definition of emergence, a “seeing from all sides,” the past, present, and future dynamically inform a coherent whole and its manifold realizations. This “seeing from all sides …..

The aperspectival subject is an assemblage: a self realized not as hypertrophied ego—in the Western image of the solitary genius—but as an ecology, the network of their relations and imprints. This view of knowledge and art making releases us from perspectival fixation (knowledge as created solely by the individual) to aperspectival relation (knowledge as flow, assemblage, comprised not only of its visible factors but also sustained by the invisible, spiritual whole). It is fitting, then to conclude this text with a gathering of integral florilegium—curated by myself and so by no means exhaustive— for the reader to delve in further for their own study of Gebser and possibly even to support varied aperspectival initiatives and projects.

Consciousness “moves” towards its intrinsic wholeness. We have been roused to wakefulness in the mental, but in the integral we are being initiated into the lucidity of origin. This is an immense, or rather we should say, immeasurable spiritual task: to not only fathom but concretize the spiritual whole. It is to allow origin to become realized in and through us. In this move from pyramidal and spatial thought to aspatial, and spherical relation, the world—time and space—become transparent to us. Objects no longer remain categorically flattened but become mysteriously open and diaphanous, shifting from points of dialectical opposition on a spatial plane to weird and wondrous expanses—singularities—arising in networked relation; in interbeing. The perspectival event horizon no longer remains the “vanishing point” for the ego but an aperspectival bridge between the invisible and visible and the domains that extend beyond the scope of the waking mind.

By granting to magic timelessness, mythical temporicity, and mental-conceptual temporality their integral efficacy, and by living them in accord with the strength of their degree of consciousness, we are able to bring about this realization. The concretion of the previous three exfoliations of original pre-temporality instantaneously opens for us pre-conscious timelessness. As such, time-freedom is not only the quintessence of time… but also the conscious quintessence of all previous time forms. Their becoming conscious—in itself a process of concretion—is also a liberation from all these time forms; everything becomes present, concrete, and thus integrable present. But this implies that preconscious origins becomes conscious present; that each and every time-form basic to one-, two-, and three-dimensional world is integrated and thereby superseded.

New worlds open up while others close down, and so this process of cultural evolution is more like the punctuated equilibrium of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge than the developmental logic of Ken Wilber’s “transcend and include.” It is true that some qualities are retained in the new mutation and even depend on their predecessor’s achievements (the emerging of mental ego is preceded by the self-consciousness of the mythical soul), but they depend on those achievements in only latency. The world-as-cave survives the mutational process as a ghost; the starry cave is shattered as the perspectival consciousness opens up its new reality with great conquering fervor and conviction, only to be recovered as a hauntology of the mythic and magic in the form of the unconscious through Freud or Jung, or even in the electric magnetism of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. In the wave of so-called postmodern thought, it was Deleuze who traced the process of thinking back to its “plane of immanence,” its realm of magical interweaving and vitalist potency, and thereby traced the structures in reverse. “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight,” he writes. Because this process is not linear but one of discontinuous leaps into new plateaus of reality, integration does not necessarily follow new mutations until we reach the integral structure. It is in the aperspectival that systasis comes to the forefront as an asystematic ordering of the whole (‘a’ bears the mark of freedom, always, in Gebser’s writing). Time realization (not clock time, mind you, but the achronon, time freedom) allows us to live in a new reality—a world from all sides—that does not rely on synthesis or categorical scaffolding to hold the structures together. Rather it is a reliance upon the non-human arranging of systasis, the integratingPress.

To truly integrate the structures requires more than a mere distanced appreciation of their remote accomplishments. We must come into glimmerings of contact with the so-called past and chance, as it were, a meeting with the dead. To know the night you must risk stumbling in the dark. The archaic, magic, and mythic always retain their potency in us; they are spiritually and ontologically present, challenging (and sometimes overtaking) the contemporary mental consciousness with the allurement of their alterity.

The double task of the integral age is both the re-integration of the twilight worlds and the concretization not of space, but time. To ware the whole and allow that waring to shine through the archaic, magic, mythic, and mental realities respectively. Transparency is the quality of the integral structure that allows such an integration to take place. As Rilke famously writes in his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, “there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” To do anything else, at this phase of human history, would be to deny tomorrow its right to be; a planetary culture is not a culture of the modern but a culture of yesterday, today, and tomorrow too. A careful reading of the structures of consciousness is one method we can use to assist us as we work to concretize the past and listen to the future

All above excerpts from: Jeremy Johnson: Seeing Through the World - Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness, 2019 Jean Gebser: The Ever Present Origin English Translation 1985 PART ONE: Foundations of the Aperspectival World Awakening of Consciousness 1949

- A Contribution to the History of the

PART TWO: Manifestations of the Aperspectival World - An Attempt at the Concretion of the Spiritual 1953

Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault If you’ve cut your teeth on the Ken Wilber roadmaps, the Gebser terrain will at first look reassuringly familiar. The familiar levels of consciousness are all right there, even designated by their familiar names: the archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral. Nor is this surprising, since Wilber explicitly acknowledges Gebser as the primary source of his model. There is one crucial difference, however. In Wilber, these are stages of consciousness. In Gebser, they are STRUCTURES of consciousness. Perhaps the significance of this nuance escapes you (it certainly escaped me initially). But on this nuance, actually, all else turns. Stages EVOLVE. They are like steps on a ladder, building sequentially one upon the other in a journey that leads onward and upward. Structures UNFOLD. They are like sections of a jigsaw puzzle or rooms in an art museum, gradually filling in to reveal the big picture (which already implicitly exists).

“With the unfolding of each consciousness mutation, consciousness increases in intensity; but the concept of evolution,with its continuous development,excludes this discontinuous characterofmutation.Theunfolding,then,isanenrichmenttied,asweshallobserve,toagain in dimensionality; yet it is also an impoverishment because of the increasing remoteness fromorigin.“ (JeanGebser,TheEver-PresentOrigin.Athens,OH:OhioUniversityPress,1985,41)

Cynthia Bourgeault That’s why I admit to cringing and shying away whenever I hear the term “Integral” being bandied about. I know I am about to encounter a terrain replete with pretentious-sounding neologisms and hyped scenarios of a glorious future. Gebser himself succumbs a bit to this temptation, allowing us to tarry too long in the illusion that a new vocabulary alone (“synareisis,”, “diaphaneity,” “waring,” etc.) is going to reveal the truth of the experience. I can almost hear E.E. Cummings clucking his tongue at these “great words, writing overmuch [that] stand helpless before the spirit at bay.” The poets get it. They always get it. Nothing is fully realized (“concretized” in Gebser’s term) until it can be expressed simply, in words already in everyday cultural use. Fortunately poets are well represented in The Ever Present Origin, and it is through Rilke and T.S. Eliot that one really begins to taste the extraordinary possibility Gebser is laying before us.

Cynthia Bourgeault This means that stages are essentially developmental. The earlier stage is folded into the next, in the process losing much of its distinctive character. The earlier stage lays the groundwork for what emerges next. The inverse way of stating this is that the earlier stage represents a more immature expression of what is to follow. It is not so in the world of unfolding. As you wander through an art museum, each room retains its essential character and wholeness; it weaves its own magic and adds its own distinctive fragrance to the mix. There are the medieval iconographers, the ornate baroque sculptures, surrealists, impressionists, cubists, each one of them retaining their own identity—“unconfused, immutable, undivided” (in the words of the Council of Chalcedon, describing the two natures of Christ). While these artistic eras did emerge at specific points in historical time, they do not replace one another or cancel out each other’s unique identity. Rather, they complement and deepen one another, like interwoven threads in an unfolding tapestry. And at certain times a certain room will speak to you more than the others. The cubists may be further along on the evolutionary timeline, but today it is the medieval icons that are calling to you

Cynthia Bourgeault Even at best it’s not easy to grasp the difference between developing and unfolding. The difficulty is further compounded, however, by the pronounced psychological bent of the models we’re more used to (Wilber’s, and following in his footsteps, Thomas Keating), which draw an explicit correlation between structures of consciousness and stages of childhood development. Thus, the “magic” structure corresponds to the consciousness of a toddler, “mythic” to a child, and “mental” to an emerging young adult. Viewed through this lens, the implication becomes well-nigh inescapable that these earlier stages are also “lower”—i.e., immature, more primitive—expressions of full adult consciousness. They are developmental phases to be passed through— “transcended and included,” perhaps— but certainly not lingered in To enter the world of Gebser, the first and most important shift required is to recognize that we are indeed talking about structures of consciousness, not stages. Forget “onward and upward.” Each of these five structures is indeed an authentic mode of participation in the world,” and if they are not, perhaps, fully equal partners, they are at least fully entitled partners. Each is as qualitatively real as the other, and each adds its particular strengths and giftednesses to the whole. They are not so much steps on a ladder as planets in orbit around the sun, which is their central point of reference, the seat of their original and continuously in-breaking arising. Gebser calls this sun “The Ever-Present Origin.” I will have much more to say about it in subsequent posts

Cynthia Bourgeault The muting or repression of any of these structures leads to an impoverishment of the whole; this is true both individually and across the broad sweep of cultural history. While these structures may emerge into manifestation at certain points along a historical timeline, they are not created by that timeline nor determined by events preceding them in the sequence. Their point of reference is the Origin, which is outside of linear time altogether and intersects with the linear timeline by a completely different set of ordering principles. They are, one might say, timeless fractals of the whole, each bearing the living water of that original fontal outpouring in their own unique pail. They are ever-present and ever-available “at the depths,” even those that have not yet emerged into full conscious articulation on the linear timeline. The “final” structure, then— the true Integral in Gebser’s worldmap—may in fact be not so much a new structure itself as a capacity to hold all the other structures simultaneously, in what Teilhard de Chardin once famously called “a paroxysm of harmonized complexity.” It is not so much a new window on the world as the capacity to see from a deeper dimension which transcends both linear and dialectical thinking and can deeply, feelingfully encompass both jagged particularity and the unitive oneness flowing through it, holding all things in relationship to their source.

P J Saher

Saher is, as geniuses usually are, a philosopher who seeks Integration. Integration here means the inclusion of those factors which enable us to gain awareness of a thing in its totality. As applied to modern science it often means the inclusion of the spiritual dimension. For instance, people in general are still under the impression that the West lays particular emphasis on the rational function. During the last decades, however, the way was prepared for a decisive change. It stands in a reciprocal relation to the commencement of the Eastern turning towards the rational and technical. From this it becomes clear that East and West are by no means opposites, but correspondences. This distinction is of importance because it constitutes the basis for the encounter of East and West. Opposites are mutually hostile elements, whereas correspondences complement each other. Therefore a genuine meeting can only take place where there is a correspondence between the encountering elements, where they are complementary poles. This is true of East and West today, more than ever before. From foreword by Jean Gebser :Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought A comparative study in the modern philosophy of religion P J Saher

P J Saher An integral philosophy reconciles the existence and development of myth, along with the quasi-philosophical truths contained in it, with the knowledge that it is only myth and not reality. In the realm of philosophy doubt need not have the sterilizing effect which it has in theology. The utility of an integral view requires that we hold two convictions: (i) we must know that symbols are necessary; and (ii) we must realize that they are only symbols. Thus such a philosophy satisfies the fundamental intuitions of the human soul by, in Blake’s words: ‘displaying the Eternal Vision, the Divine similitude which if man ceases to behold he ceases to exist.’ Finally, it offers a criticism of this from the only point of view which, perhaps, is just, the intuitive one. The integral view passes judgement on philosophical, metaphysical, and religious ideas, accepting or rejecting them according to the richness of their content and their potentialities for beauty and harmony. We thus have a barometer for forecasting the coming philosophical weather of ideas. This an integral view can alone provide. If the barrier of rational limitations can be broken only through intuition, then the latter is the bond between philosophy and the so-called primitive mind. For if intuition exists, it must have been strongest in the primitive period of humanity.

P J Saher As our knowledge of the primitive increases, we shall understand better the symbolism of philosophy. As our analysis of symbolism becomes more accurate, we shall understand more the profound meaning of primitive beliefs, the power of which made it possible for them to subsist in their crude forms in the midst of highly developed cultures and among gifted races, in ancient India and throughout the whole history of Africa.

Once we accustom ourselves to think in terms of ideas, and not of the persons who had them, we realize at once that. all ideas occur in the mind (not the brain), and we no longer restrict them according to geographical accidents and historical time-tables. Unfortunately we still refer to the ideas in relation to their thinkers instead of in vacuo.

P J Saher The Songs of Innocence and Experience are intended to show, as Blake himself said, ‘two contrary states of the human soul’. The two Songs (or the series of songs) are therefore themselves symbols representing the possibilities for good and evil in human nature. By this symbolism Blake not only meant that the one cannot exist without the other but also that: ‘without contraries [there] is no Progression’. We are here reminded of Kant’s analogy of the bird flying in thin air wrongly believing that it could fly even better in a vacuum and therefore hating the resistance of the atmosphere. For Blake the meaning of Christ’s ‘Love your enemy’ seems to be ‘convert resistance (the enemy) into power’. The human soul like Kant’s bird can rise only when it meets with opposition which it turns into an uplifting force. The two Songs are, therefore, contrasted elements in a single pattern. By innocence Blake does not mean the innocence which comes through ignorance, but that which comes through wisdom. The human soul evolves from the innocence (born of ignorance) to the innocence (born of wisdom) via experience.

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.

Bayo Akomolafe May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.

Bayo Akomolafe “Death needs a new cosmology. Death is not a black hole where things cease to be. If you want to live well, keep death close. Hope includes hopelessness and grieving is showing gratitude for that which has been lost. What would it be like to treat grief as power? Even our hopelessness as a form of decomposing and falling away that is sacred” “It isn’t that the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home. That is why the mystics tell us it is always there, closer than close. Nonetheless, our journeys away from home have their purpose. A will stronger than our own sends us on these journeys. If we do not someday leave home, then home will leave us.” ― Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home

Falling might very well be flying – without the tyranny of coordinates.

Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta “Increase is different from growth, because you don’t want the size of the system to grow, but you want the relationships within the system, the exchange within the system, that needs to increase. And you can increase that quite infinitely.” “Many Aboriginal stories tell us how we must travel in free-ranging patterns, warning us against charging ahead in crazy [linear] ways.” “All Law-breaking comes from that first evil thought; that original sin of placing yourself above the land or above other people.” “Nothing is created or destroyed; it just moves and changes, and this is the First Law.” “Every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system, or it will stagnate – this applies to economic and social systems as well as natural ones.” “Sedentary lifestyles and cultures that do not move with the land or mimic land-based networks in their social systems do not transition well through apocalyptic moments.”

Tyson Yunkaporta “People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. But the real understanding comes in the spaces in-between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points.” “If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion: outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. … The damage of violence is minimized when it is distributed throughout the system rather than centralized into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions.” “It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network.” “There is more to narrative than simply telling our stories. We have to compare our stories with the stories of others to seek greater understanding about our reality.”

Tyson Yunkaporta “There’s no valid way to separate the natural from the synthetic, the digital from the ecological.” “Most of us today are living in a state of compliance with imposed roles and tasks rather than a heightened state of engagement. We are slaves to a work ethic that is unnatural and unnecessary.” “The assistance people need is not in learning about Aboriginal knowledge but in remembering their own.” “The only sustainable way to store data long term is within relationships.” “[From an Aboriginal perspective] an observer does not try to be objective, but is integrated within a sentient system that is observing itself.” “Understanding biological networks appropriately means finding a way to belong personally to that system.” “Somewhere between action and reaction is an interaction, and that’s where all the magic and fun lies.”

Tyson Yunkaporta “Your culture is not what your hands touch or make – it’s what moves your hands.” “Guilt is like any other energy: you can’t accumulate it or keep it because it makes you sick and disrupts the system you live in – you have to let it go. Face the truth, make amends, and let it go.” “Stop asking the question: ‘Are we alone?’ Of course we’re not! Everything in the universe is alive and full of knowledge.” “Somewhere between action and reaction is an interaction, and that’s where all the magic and fun lies.”

C. B

“In finding the world as we do, we forget all we did to find it as such, and when we are reminded of it in retracing our steps back to indicators, we find little more than a mirror-to-mirror image of ourselves and the world. In contrast with what is commonly assumed, a description, when carefully inspected, reveals the properties of the observer. We observers, distinguish ourselves precisely by distinguishing what we apparently are not, the world." Spencer Brown

Dancing in our Dreams

Stepping out

Integrating view

Sym van der Ryn

Towards an Ecological Epoch

Sim van der Ryn

Ecological design is a major part of our coming future and is necessary for the prosperity of our species as caretakers for the world. Ecological Design, address five principles in design that will help to move society in the right direction. These principles are: solutions from your place, ecological accounting, designing with nature, everyone is a designer, and making nature visible. It has been over the course of the last century that building designers and engineers have neglected the entirety of environmental impacts that went into their buildings. They have built, I believe, from a strictly human perspective with regard only to what the majority wants. It considers the impacts of any given design, ecological or not. It looks for low cost and low impact relationships in the design of a building and all of its interactions with the outside world. One way I interpret this idea is by asking myself if a building is “invisible.” This describes the impacts of a building and whether or not those impacts are large enough to consider the building there at all. Besides displacing a small amount of habitat, a building should not create any other externalities and should be an equal balance of input to outputs without creating pollutants. Two energy laws summarize this point well, “The energy stored in the inputs must equal the energy stored in the outputs plus any waste”, and secondly “that energy degrades in quality or usefulness as it is converted from one form to another”. The promotion of ecological accounting with ESCO was a good way of taking those who know what they are doing and showing those who don’t know through action. ESCO installs energy efficiency appliances and helps to reduce energy consumption. The megawatt, or unit for decreased energy demand, is the backbone of their work in ecological accounting. While accounting is a great theoretical and practical use, I find that the world is so engrained into its current way of life that it is hard in some cases to make it positively accountable.

Towards an Ecological Epoch

Sim van der Ryn

QUALITIES & QUANTITIES This simple diagram presents a client or designer with the intrinsic qualities and material quantities that are integrated into a specific design solution. At the center is a measure of a final product in human, environmental and economic performance.

www.simvanderryn.com/philosophy/

Towards an Ecological Epoch

Sim van der Ryn

www.simvanderryn.com/philosophy/

Towards an Ecological Epoch

Sim van der Ryn

www.simvanderryn.com/philosophy/

Towards an Ecological Epoch ECOLOGICAL LEARNING CURVE

For years as a Professor and consultant to schools at levels from pre-school through high school, I imagined in my mind a picture of how all the elements of learning at different ages could be represented in a diagram that integrated learning levels with place, pattern, and process and also spatial scales of natural and humanly created systems. The Ecological Learning Curve is that diagram. The learning age levels is represented vertically from bottom to top. The type of learning is represented by the circles of Place, Pattern, Process. Place at the bottom recognizes that young children learn best no through abstraction but by direct experience of Place. As their minds and brains grow, they begin to learn patterns, and later, the processes that shape our world.

The scale of systems – natural and invented – is represented horizontally from the largest on the left to the smallest on the right. The center line represents a “home base” of scales closest to us in size, with the left bar moving to large scales, the right side to smaller scales.

Sim van der Ryn

Outer views

Critical Zone Terra Forma & Nature X Human

Critical zone

Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth Bruno Latour

You want me to land on Earth? Why? — Because you’re hanging in mid-air, headed for a crash. — How is it down there? — Pretty tense. — A war zone? — Close: a Critical Zone, a few kilometres thick, where everything happens. — Is it habitable? — Depends on your chosen science. — Will I survive down there? — Depends on your politics.

Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth Bruno Latour

As everybody learned at school, when the position of the Earth in the cosmos is modified, a revolution in social order might ensue. Remember Galileo: when astronomers made the Earth move around the sun, the whole fabric of society felt under attack. Today, again, four centuries later, the role and the position of the Earth is being revolutionized by new disciplines: it appears that human behaviour has pushed the Earth to react in unexpected ways. And once again, the whole organization of society is being subverted. Shake the cosmic order and the order of politics will be shaken as well. Except that, this time, the question is not to make the Earth move around the sun, but to move it somewhere else altogether! As if we had to learn anew how to land on it. — “Landing on Earth? Why would anyone attempt to land there? Are we not already on Earth?” Well, not quite! And that’s the circumstance this book tries to present to the inquiring reader: it seems that there has been in the past some misinterpretation over what it means to be earthly. If you believe it means “practical”, “mundane”, “secular”, “material” or even “materialist”, you’re in for a surprise.

The critical zone The critical zone (CZ) is the nearsurface environment where rock, soil, water, air, and life interact. The exploded view on the inset top right represents both the vertically deeper and longer time scale foci of CZ science relative to most hydrological or ecological research. The four transects from mountains to sea illustrates the multiscale nature of CZ processes [

The critical zone humans have modified more than half of Earth's land surface, that the current rate of land transformation is unsustainable, and that "changes that human activities have wrought on Earth's life support system have worried many people". To many scientists and citizens, these threats to an essential component, i.e. the Critical Zone, of our life support system, have reached an acute level, yet the science of understanding and managing these threats mostly remains embedded within individual disciplines, and the science has largely remained qualitative - there has never been a more important time for a truly international and interdisciplinary approach to accelerate our understanding of Critical Zone processes and how to intervene positively to mitigate threats and sustain and enhance Critical Zone function. All life on Earth relies on humanity embracing balance and sustainability on a global scale.

The critical zone Since the field’s inception, critical zone scientists have shown how altering Earth’s surface and vegetation leads to subsurface impacts—changing water flow, minerals, and microbial life at surprising depths. Subsurface imaging and drilling have also shown considerable belowground variation and the ways in which that alteration influences surface conditions. These discoveries opened the door to more applied research and better land management practices.

The critical zone The critical zone (CZ) is the near-surface environment where rock, soil, water, air, and life interact. The exploded view on the inset top right represents both the vertically deeper and longer time scale foci of CZ science relative to most hydrological or ecological research. The four transects from mountains to sea illustrates the multiscale nature of CZ processes [Winter et al., 1998].

Critical Zone

Critical Zone science would be too dispersive and complicated to understand if we outline recent CZ results by each discipline involved. Instead, we advocate a framework of “deep” science to help organize and comprehend research done in CZ science with a more synergistic perspective. Three foci are included in this perceived “deep” science framework: deep time, deep depth, and deep coupling. This “deep” science concept highlights the essence of integrating Earth surface processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales and signifies the unique contributions of CZ science to environmental and ecological research.

Terra forma

Terra Forma A Book of Speculative Maps By Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire Foreword by Bruno Latour … the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travellers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth's underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.

Critical Zone Dynamics

Terra Forma

Critical Zone Dynamics

Terra Forma

Cartogenesis offers a frame of reference and a language of signs or notations in order to present not an administrative territory where the borders and edges of the landscape prevail, but conversely the shifting and sometimes unpredictable territory of the living. A six-month ‘etho-ethnographic’ survey of the territory enabled the recording of interactions between humans and nonhumans occupying this portion of the Ardennes forest. The analysis of the interviews and the observation of the practices of several key actors revealed life journeys that mingle with those of other non-human living beings, composing crossed trajectories which are traced in the map: the forest ranger, the wild boars, foxes, scientists studying forest animals, martens, GPS, the creator of the newspaper La Hulotte, teasel seeds, owls, bees and beekeepers, crows, hunters, the hydraulic network, migratory birds, ornithologist, the brother breeders, woodworms, badgers, bats, woodpeckers, deer, hunting dogs, ….

Terra Forma

Terra Forma Terra Forma tells about the exploration of an unknown land: ours. Five centuries after the Renaissance travellers who left to map the terra incognita of the New World, this work proposes to rediscover differently this Earth that we think we know so well. By redefining, or rather by extending the traditional cartographic vocabulary, it offers a manifesto for the foundation of a new geographic and, in so doing, political imagination. "

Material Ecology Neri Oxman

Nature X Human

Material Ecology

Nature X Humanity

Material Ecology

In ‘Mental’ Integral terms this thinking Material ecology all in the AQAL - Right Hand Quadrants of Objectivity and Interobjective Material ecology is about the production of artifacts either via technology or by using nature It is Bucky lite

Nature X Human If life on Earth is to survive, we must rethink our relationship with Nature. The last four billion years on Earth have been governed by natural selection and organic biochemistry, endowing us with five kingdoms of life and six common elements with which to sustain it. In a fraction of this time, over seven material ages, four industrial revolutions and 118 elements, humankind’s impact on the planet has instigated a climate disaster, escalated biodiversity loss, and intensified pandemic threats associated with commercial wildlife trade. We now find ourselves on the verge of replacing Earth-bound natural selection with silicon-based life and indigenous wisdom with technological singularity. For the first time in our planet’s record, human-designed constructs — materials, products, and buildings — outweigh Earth’s entire biomass. Although human beings are part of the natural world, human activity and the “goods” we design and build — from our clothes to our cities — have increasingly set us apart from nature, negatively impacting ourselves and our planet. Given a choice between protecting nature and advancing human endeavours, which would you pick? Might the designed constructs that divide us instead reunite us? Beyond repairing what we have already damaged, can we positively contribute to the advancement of nature? In partnering with humanity, can (and should) nature have a virtue beyond her own existence, beyond a ‘primordial agency’ of self-propagation? How might we leverage design to mediate between biology and technology, the lab and the garden, nature and humanity? In other words, can we choose both, by design?

Material Ecology

Material Ecology is an emerging field in design denoting informed relations between products, buildings, systems, and their environment (Oxman, 2010). Defined as the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication, the field operates at the intersection of Biology, Materials Science & Engineering, and Computer Science with emphasis on environmentally informed digital design and fabrication. With the advent of digital fabrication techniques and technologies, digital material representations such as voxels (3-D pixels) and maxels (a portmanteau of the words 'material' and 'voxel') have come to represent material ingredients, for instance in the context of additive manufacturing processes. In other words, designers are now able to compute material properties and behaviour built-in to form-generation procedures. Combined with the designer's capacity to analyze structural and environmental forces, the enabled mediation between matter and the environment through fabrication appears to be as powerful as the ethos of craft itself. The ability to design, analyze and fabricate using a single material unit implies unity between physical and digital matter, enabling nearly seamless mappings between environmental constraints, fabrication methods and material expression Such unity - like that found in natural bone, a bird's nest, a typical African hut and a woven basket - might promote a truly ecological design paradigm, facilitating formal expression constrained by, and supportive of its hosting environment. Ultimately, the faculty to author new forms of expression will depend on the craft triptych (matter, fabrication, environment) and its integration into the design practice as an undifferentiated scheme.

The Krebs cycle of creativity The Quadrants of Understanding

Nature X Humanity

Material Ecology The Bauhaus wheel diagram, circa 1920

The Krebs cycle of creativity III, circa 2020

Material Ecology manifesto-nature-humanity

Critical Zone Critical Zone science

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” ― Carl Sagan,

Pale blue dot

“side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need . . . knowledge is power, and we want to know what comes next, we want it all mapped out . . . I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways.” “Meditating on the possible forms of a future culture after modernity in her essay,“A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula K.Le Guin

Consciousness

Ancestor

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset "Niitsitapi” (Blackfoot) proverb

Dancing with the Ancestors

Kosmology - Cosmology Definition of kosmology Kosmos refers to the traditional and pre-scientific worldview which acknowledges not only matter, but also life, mind, soul and spirit. Definition of cosmology : branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe : a theory or doctrine describing the natural order of the universe Definition of metaphysics : a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and that includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology metaphysics … analyses the generic traits manifested by existences of any kind : Ontology : abstract philosophical studies - a study of what is outside objective experience Definition of ontology : a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being Ontology deals with abstract entities. : a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence Definition of epistemology the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity

searching meaning

I am the watcher at the gate I am the keeper of dreams

Magic Mythic

"Life can be like a dream; if so, one wonders whether it is by living that we dream or by dreaming that we live." West African proverb

African & Yoruba philosophy

Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication "Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication; and to communicate is to emit and to receive waves and radiations (minika ye minienie). This process of, receiving and releasing or passing them on (tambula ye tambikisa) is the key to human beings game of survival. A person is perpetually bathed by radiations' weight, (zitu kia minienie). The weight (zitu/demo) of radiations may have a negative as well as positive impact on any tiny being, for example a person who represents the most vibrating: "kolo" (knot) of relationships." "The following expressions are very common among the Bantu, in general, and among the Kongo in particular, which prove to us the antiquity of these concepts in the African continent; Our businesses are waved/shaken; our health is waved/shaken; what we possess is waved/shaken; the communities are waved/shaken: Where are these (negative) waves coming from (Salu bieto bieti nikunwa; mavimpi nikunwa; biltuvwidi nikunwa; makanda nikunwa: Kwe kutukanga minika miami)?" "For the Bantu, a person lives and moves within an ocean of waves/radiations. One is sensitive or immune to them. To be sensitive to waves is to be able to react negatively or positively to those waves/forces. But to be immune to surrounding waves/forces, is to be less reactive to them or not at all. These differences account for varying degrees in the process of knowing/learning among individuals"

Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication Motivating this … is an interest in employing phenomenological analysis to explore several Yorùbá originary narratives not as cultural artifacts to be cast aside as outmoded myth but as dynamic sources of knowledge production anchoring a compelling epistemological perspective. The analysis yielded a range of insights appertaining to Yorùbá epistemology. Some principal ones include the following: • The universe is an environment wherein human meaning is at every stage rooted in the generative entanglement of the spiritual and material dimensions. • Yorùbá epistemology indicates that a vital function of human knowledge involves sharpening awareness of matter as a fundamentally irreducible reality whose deepest meanings frustrate the powers of human reason. • In a Yorùbá perspective, matter emerges not as inert stuff but as a reconfigurable vessel of spiritual power that, by way of engagement, yields knowledge about the physical world as an environment shaped by profound creative potential and flux. • The function of Ifá dídá (the Yorùbá divinatory process) is instructive because it facilitates an awareness of the role of Yorùbá cosmology in the construction of knowledge. The multivalent linguistic construction of deities in Yorùbá cosmology via a combination of intricate relational conceptualization and oral theo-philosophical discourse is an epistemological tradition.

Africa The richness of Africa, culturally, is vast. That's the challenge that we have to face, because most of the time, people in the western world, their attention span is really narrow. Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. Beryl Markham You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept. You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite. Ali Mazrui

African Proverbs • • • •

•

• •

The fool speaks, the wise man listens Every closed eye is not sleeping; and every open eye is not seeing Once you carry your own water, you will learn the value of every drop. We desire to bequeath two things to our children: The first one is roots, the other one is wings You can out distance that which is running after you, but you cannot out distance that which is running inside you In the moment of crises, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams. Nigerian proverb Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it. Ewe proverb (Togo) Do not set sail using someone else’s star When you educate a man you educate and individual. when you educate a woman you educate a generation

African Proverbs • • • • • • • • • •

•

If we stand tall it is because we stand on the shoulders of many ancestors The earth is a beehive, we enter by the, same door Don’t look where you fell, but where you slipped To get lost is to learn the way I am because you are The eye never forgets what the heart has seen A bird that flies of the earth and lands on an anthill is still on the ground The opinion of the wise is better than the certainly of the fool No problem is solved until it is settled right Education is not the accumulation of knowledge but the awakening of consciousness The earth is not given to you by your parents but loaned to you by your children

Australian Aboriginal

Aboriginal philosophy (Aboriginal) traditions embody a unique and profound view of reality that may even now be developed by Aboriginal scholars to enrich the mainstream of human thought. The skills are precisely what the nation needs to appreciate and to conserve a unique environment in real danger. - Charles Rowley 1970 Aboriginal philosophy comes from the time of creation when the world was very "mixed up" and not at all like it is in modern times. Supreme beings, great ancestors who were human, animal and bird all at the same time, anthropomorphs, were powerful enough to create order in this chaos. These ancestral heroes are responsible for life itself; life that arose in a time when all the natural species, the land and humans, were part of the same ongoing life force. They had powers to turn themselves into geographic or natural features, they descended into the ground and reappeared as a species of bird or animal, or as a waterhole, or they ascended into the sky and became constellations. As they moved around they created all the species, humans, the landscape and all the features of it, then they tended to settle down and remain as a feature of the landscape.

Dreamtime

Aboriginal philosophy is a wholistic template for living in the Australian environment, for the conservation of the species and the natural world, for minimising conflict in human relations and for ensuring the continuation of the conditions for survival. Aboriginal understandings of the process of creation and of peoples' place in the natural world, which does, after all, sustain all of humankind, is a valuable source of knowledge and inspiration for all peoples. Finally, Aboriginal "law" is fixed, immutable and constant: One cannot fix the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhere. We should be very wrong to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden, though it was an age of heroes, when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do….. …...clearly the Dreaming is many things in one…….among them a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for (Aboriginal) man. W E H Stanner 1979

Aboriginal Quotations “We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.” – Tom Dystra Traveller, there are no paths. Paths are made by walking.” – Australian Aboriginal Proverb Our spirituality is oneness and an interconnectedness with all that lives and breathes, even with all that does not live or breathe.” – Mudrooroo “The land is my mother. Like a human mother, the land gives us protection, enjoyment, and provides our needs – economic, social, and religious. We have a human relationship with the land: Mother, daughter, son. When the land is taken from us or destroyed, we feel hurt because we belong to the land, and we are part of it.” – Djinyini Gondarra “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.” – Australian Aboriginal Proverb

Some other ancestorial no Eurocentric philosophies and metaphysical ideas to explore to add to the diversity of the area and density of interaction:

Australian Aboriginals/First Nations:

Dreamtime/Dreaming

Aboriginal Australians' oral tradition and spiritual values build on reverence for the land and on a belief in the Dreamtime, or Dreaming. The Dreaming is considered to be both the ancient time of creation and the present-day reality of Dreaming. It describes the Aboriginal cosmology, and includes the ancestral stories about the supernatural creator-beings and how they created places. Each story can be called a "Dreaming", with the whole continent criss-crossed by Dreamings or ancestral tracks, also represented by song-lines.

Metaphysis

(Blackfoot)

Niitsitapi

Niitsitapi Blackfoot

The religious life of the Blackfoot centers upon medicine bundles and their associated rituals. These bundles are individually owned and ultimately originated from an encounter with a supernatural spirit. These encounters take the form of dreams or visions, which are sought in a typical Plains type of vision quest. A young man, usually under the tutelage of an older medicine man, goes out to an isolated place and prays and fasts until he has a vision. Many of these men fail and never have a vision. Individual bundles acquire great respect. Some of these are headdresses, shirts, shields, knives, and “medicine objects”. Painted lodges are considered to be medicine bundles, and there are more than 50 of them among the three main Blackfoot groups. The most important bundles to the group as a whole are the Beaver Bundles, the Medicine Pipe Bundles, and the Sun Dance Bundle.

Niitsitapi Blackfoot

People dance to the sun, praying for a vision, and historically the way someone does this is by sacrifice—to go into that lodge to give of yourself without food, without water, for four days. – Sundance Chief Patterson

Niitsitapi Blackfoot During the summer, the Blackfoot lived in large tribal camps. It was during this season that they conducted Buffalo Hunts in times gone by, and the Sun Dance ceremonies are held in summer. During the winter, they separated into bands of from approximately 10 to 20 lodges. Band membership is quite fluid. There might be several headmen in each band, and one of them is considered the chief. Headmanship is very informal. The qualifications for the office were once “wealth” and success in war, as well as ceremonial experience.

Niitsitapi Blackfoot

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Regard heaven as your father, earth as your mother and all things as your brothers and sisters.

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No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.

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Do not judge your neighbour until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

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Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past. Wisdom is of t he future.

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All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.

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The one that tells the stories rules the world.

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The soul would have no rainbows if the eye had no tears.

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Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

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When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

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Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.

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If a man is as wise as a snake, he can afford to be as harmless as a dove.

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When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with for us.

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If we wonder often, the gift of knowledge will come.

Maslow’s Western Perspective based on Blackfoot Pyramid

derived after spending a number of weeks with a Blackfoot community in Canada

Annex I

Other Kosmologies

Kosmologies

Tibetan: Buddhism, Bon, …. Being overwhelmingly Buddhist in nature, Tibetan philosophy has a soteriological aim; one engages in philosophical investigation not only to gain an understanding of the world, but so that such an understanding can aid in eliminating suffering. For Buddhists, all human suffering arises from misunderstanding the nature of the world; through study and philosophical reflection one can come to have a better grasp of the nature of reality —particularly of suffering and its causes. When one understands this, one can avoid much suffering by beginning to act and cultivate dispositions that are in accord with reality. Modern philosophical theorizing in the West is commonly thought to aim at discovering the nature of reality or of the best way to live. However, such theorizing does not often include the aim of integrating such a view of reality into everyday actions or cultivating one’s own dispositions so as to actually live in the best way possible. For Tibetans and the Buddhist tradition more generally, since the goal of philosophical investigation is to produce a practical result, one deals not only with questions like “What is the best way to act?” but also “How can I come to act that way?”

Some other ancestorial not Eurocentric philosophies and metaphysical ideas to explore and add to the diversity of the area and density of interaction:

Japanese: Zen, Shinto

The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday lifeworld when associating with one’s self, other people, and nature. The everyday lifeworld for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, egological, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm in practice by achieving a holistic and nondualistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with stillness of mind, a life directed toward the concrete thingevents of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature, called “buddha-nature.”

Egyptian: philosophy

which had a great influence of Greek

Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River, situated in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes. The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

Indian: Vedanta, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, . ….

Metaphysics Vedanta philosophies discuss three fundamental metaphysical categories and the relations between the three. 1. Brahman or Ishvara: the ultimate reality; 2. Ātman or Jivātman: the individual soul, self; 3. Prakriti/Jagat: the empirical world, everchanging physical universe, body and matter

People do not perceive worlds but enact them. Different mindsets bring forth different worlds.

Mayan: A very different

concept of time from the ‘west’ The Maya civilization was a Mesoamerican civilization developed by the Maya peoples, and noted for its logo syllabic script—the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in pre-Columbian Americas—as well as for its art, architecture, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system. The Maya civilization developed in the area that today comprises south-eastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. It includes the northern lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula and the highlands of the Sierra Madre, the Mexican state of Chiapas, southern Guatemala, El Salvador, and the southern lowlands of the Pacific littoral plain

Chinese: Taoism Taoism (or Daoism) is a philosophy that originated in ancient China and continues to be practiced today, mostly throughout Asia but in small numbers around the world. Tao means “the way,” and practitioners follow “the way” that is described in the central book of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching. Reportedly written around 700 BCE by Lao Tzu, it describes the experience of living life in accordance with Tao. A series of poems, aphorisms, and meditations on various subjects, the book describes how to live a harmonious life and build a harmonious community of individuals. Taoism is often understood as valuing balance and a necessary unity of all extremes, symbolized in the black and white Yin Yang symbol.

Middle East:

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, … The dominant philosophies in the ‘Euro/American centric world today and have to a degree contributed to the current worldview and current state of the world today

Annex II

Can we ever see the world as just a four letter word or in any simple code

VUCA

BANI

EPIAPSE The way we ‘see’ the world, the world ‘is’

VUCA

B A N

Brittle the kind of illusive fortress that seemingly solid systems have but which can easily crumble. Anxious: the anxiety caused by continuous changes. This anxiety can lead to passivity when you feel that changes are an avalanche and that there is no way to influence them.

Incomprehensible: the consequence of excess information and its often counterintuitive nature (like what occurs when AI or Big Data intervenes). Fortunately, what is incomprehensible today does not have to be tomorrow.

requires Capacity & Resilience

CREMCATI

V U C A

Volatile Things change continuously. What is true today isn’t true tomorrow. Even the nature and dynamics of change change. Uncertain More than ever, we live with a lack of predictability and a prospect for surprise. It is impossible to predict how projects will evolve. Complex Simple cause-and-effect chains have been replaced by complex interconnected forces and events. Interconnectedness makes all things increasingly complex. Ambiguous You can easily find convincing but totally contradictory information for any assertion. Because of complexity and unpredictability the ubiquitous availability of information has created a mist in which it becomes increasingly difficult to find clarity.

Context & Adaptivity

Transparency & Intuition

BANI

requires Capacity & Resilience

CREMCATI

Nonlinear: the disconnection and disproportion between cause and effect. We may now be seeing the impact on the climate as a result of actions taken 40 years ago; could these consequences have been predicted then?

Empathy & Mindfulness

Empathy & Mindfulness Context & Adaptivity

Transparency & Intuition

Moving on from 4 letter words

E C I A P S E

Entangled Emergent Context Infolding, Unfolding, Enfolding & Embracing Aperspectival Asystematic Place Spirit Emergent

Soul Microbiome Transparency Intuition Presence Creativity Counter-intuitive Robust & resilient Regenerative Symbiotic Bundled Weaving The Web that has no Weaver Patterns of patterns Systems of systems etc. …

ECAIPE unintended consequences are surfed generatively www.integralmentors.org

Urban Hub 28 Stepping in to step out

Bibliography

Biographies

Integral Mutations Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a German poet, philosopher, and phenomenologist of consciousness. He is best known for his magisterial opus, The Ever-Present Origin (Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1949-1953), in which he articulates the structures and mutations of consciousness underpinning pivotal shifts in human civilization. Gebser’s key insight was that as consciousness mutates toward its innate integrality, it drastically restructures human ontology and with it civilisation as a whole. Jeremy Johnson is an author (Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness), publisher (Revelore Press), editor (Integral Leadership Review) and integral philosopher. Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally acclaimed retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude in her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. P.J.Saher, is best known for his book Eastern Wisdom and Western thought, was born in Bombay and studied in England and Germany. He gave up a career at the Bar to take up research in mysticism, mastered yoga, and came under the influence first of Heidegger, then of Radhakrishnan and Huxley. Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. He is a recipient of the 2021 New Thought Walden Award, meant to honor those who use empowering spiritual ideas and philosophies to change lives and make our planet a better place. Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne.

Integral Mutations Sim Van der Ryn Architect, author, and educator has been integrating ecological principles into the built environment for more than 40 years. He spent 35 years as professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and was California’s State Architect for Governor Jerry Brown in the late 1970s, designing and building the State’s first energy efficient and climate-responsive building. Sim’s signature style, his collaborative approach and metadisciplinary accomplishments continue to show us the way to an evolving era that values both the integrity of ecological systems and quality of life for all.

Critical Zone & Terra Forma

Bruno Latour (1947 – 2022) was emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the program in political arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. In addition to curating Critical Zones in ZKM (opening August 2020) he was, together with Martin Guinard, curator of the Taipeh Biennale of Art (opening October 2020). A member of several academies, he was the recipient in 2013 of the Holberg Prize and of the Kyoto Prize in 2021. A philosopher and anthropologist, the author of We Have Never Been Modern, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia, Down to Earth, and many other books. Frédérique Aït-Touati is a science historian, theater director, and Research Fellow at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). Alexandra Arènes is a landscape architect working on a project in Gaia-graphy at the University of Manchester. Axelle Grégoire is an architect who has worked in urban planning and on experimental transdisciplinary research projects on the city.

Nature X Human material ecology

Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli designer and professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she led the Mediated Matter research group. She is known for art and architecture that combine design, biology, computing, and materials engineering.

Founder, creator, curator Paul van Schaik, Architect, author, educator, publisher, and international development adviser. Founder of integralMENTORS, integral Urban Hub ,and vS Publishing. Founder and curator of Urban Hub series on Thriveable Cities and Worlds. . Co founder of Integral Without Borders and Co founder Living, Cities, Earth.

Urban Hub series

Books

Guides for Integrally Informed Practitioners The Guides for Integrally Informed Practitioners (adjacent) cover much of the theory behind the Integral Meta-framework used in these volumes. For topics covered in other volumes in this series see the following page. Urban Hub Series These books are a series of presentations for the use of Integral theory or an Integral Meta-framework in understanding cities and urban Thriveability. Although each can stand alone, taken together they give a more rounded appreciation of how this broader framework can help in the analysis and design of thriveable urban environments. Key to an Integral approach to urban design is the notion that although other aspects of urban life are important, people (sentient beings), as individuals and communities, are the primary ‘purpose’ for making cities thriveable. All other aspects (technology, transport & infra-structure, health, education, sustainability, economic development, etc.) although playing a major part, are secondary. Pdf versions are gratis to view & download @: https://www.slideshare.net/PauljvsSS issuu.com/paulvanschaik

Urban Hub Series Hardcopies can be purchased from Amazon

SPANISH

January 2023

Urban Hub manuals prepared for C40 Cities Thriving Cities Initiative and others published by vS Publishing SPANISH

Pub. April 2022

Other books published by vS Publishing

Pub. April 2022

Notes

People do not perceive worlds but enact them. Different mindsets bring forth different worlds.

Notes

People do not perceive worlds but enact them. Different mindsets bring forth different worlds.

A series of books from integralMENTORS Integral UrbanHub work on Thriving people & Thriveable Cities

Integral UrbanHub Thriveable Worlds

Urban Hub

Stepping in to Step out

Too little courage and we will fail – too much certainty and we will fail. But with care and collaboration we have a chance of bringing forth emergent impacts through innovation, syngeneic enfoldment & collaborative effort. A deeper understanding of a broader framework will be required – this would be more that an Mental integral vision and beyond the Eurocentric AQAL & SDI. No one vision is sufficient in and of itself – visions can guide but only by collaborative action in a creative generative process can visions grow and become part of an ongoing positive sociocultural reality. Without taking into account the many worldviews that currently co-exist and crafting ways of including them in a positive and healthy form we will continue to alienate vast sections of all communities of humankind.