Inclusional Research
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How inspiring might it be for us to learn to appreciate, that from our first intake of breath to our last gasp, life is a gift that comes from our natural inclusion in a co-creative energy flow, which we hold openly and pass on with love and care to others as others pass on to us? How profound an education into the wider implications of our human belonging with, not to one another in natural communion would this present? How could it deepen and enrich our social, psychological and environmental relationships and enable us to come to terms with our mortality, vulnerabilities and differences not as weaknesses and sources of conflict, but vital ingredients of our evolutionary community play? But, by and large, we don’t learn this lesson because our currently predominating systems of education continually promote competitive mentalities that reinforce the adage of Darwinian selection theory that life is a struggle for existence that only the elite can endure. We teach ourselves to race selfishly against prescriptive standards for some kind of winner’s trophy that we can proudly display and hold on to in opposition to and at the expense of others. Those who lose out are regarded as failures whose best hope is to be on the receiving end of charity or minimal wages for menial work, trickling down from the excesses of their superiors. At worst they may be treated as junk, to be discarded on the wayside if they are not to be a burdensome detraction from the enterprise of the successful. Meanwhile, just as we are driving ourselves to succeed at all costs, other moralizing voices are telling us to be democratic, altruistic, egalitarian, law-abiding citizens if we are not to be judged unfavourably by higher authority. We come to live by double standards that stall the flow of our natural co-creativity and neighbourly humanity. Competitive mentalities can only aggravate the distress, mistrust, disparity, carelessness, fault-intolerance, resentment and conflict within and between human communities that is fuelling a burgeoning social, psychological and environmental crisis. So why do we persist in educationally adulterating ourselves in this way, even from the earliest years when we are barely out of nappies? How on Earth could we have come to believe that competition is somehow good for learning and evolutionary advancement? The rot begins to set in the moment we become deluded into believing that we are "self-possessed", discrete individual "subjects" paradoxically independent from yet capable of doing things to and having things done to us by the "objects" that surround us in our natural neighbourhood. This promotes both a fearful and exploitative attitude of "self" towards "other" that puts the ownership of our very lives at stake – capable of being "taken away" or "subtracted" in a way that reduces us to nothing unless we strike first. This attitude, and its tragic implications, is all too evident in Hamlet's famous soliloquy: To be or not to be, that is the question: whether "tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?" Herein lies the great false dichotomy, embedded in the rationalistic logical foundations that to this day underpin our objectivist science and mathematics, which, for the sake of convenience, not truth, dislocates the individual self from its spatial context or neighbourhood and places the two in opposition. The "I" is treated as if it is an independent singularity, a positive "one alone" that is threatened by and strives to deny and defy the "negativity" of the receptive omnipresence throughout nature, which resides both in its heart and everywhere around. This treatment enables the "I" to be held fully responsible for its behaviour and so rewarded or punished in accord with definitive standards of good and bad, regardless of its dynamic situation. It leads to the pursuit of an unrealistic, fixed ideal, any variation from or around which is disparaged as a deviation or "error". This perfectionism truly does hold the evolutionarily creative pleasure of our learning lives to ransom and addicts us to conflict as we teach it to our offspring in an endless vicious cycle. At the root of this dichotomy is the presupposition that matter and space are mutually exclusive. On the basis of this presupposition, we divide the world into the material that matters and counts as "something" and the immaterial that doesn’t matter and counts as "nothing". Yet a moment’s reflection of how nature would be if it consisted of pure space (i.e. it would be formless), and if it consisted solely of matter (i.e. it would be a dimensionless concrete point) reveals that each is inextricable from the other. Moreover, modern scientific findings that have given rise to relativity, quantum mechanics and non-linear dynamical systems theory all make sense in terms of the mutual dynamic inclusion of informational (electromagnetic) and spatial (thermal and gravitational) phases in a heterogeneous, variably resistive and accommodative natural energy flow. There is therefore a need for a new, more realistic evolutionary understanding of learning processes whereby the creativity of life is not regarded as a discrete material possession that individuals can claim sole ownership of, but as a gift of natural energy flow. The foundations for this new approach have been laid in concepts of "inclusionality", "natural inclusion" and "natural communion". Inclusionality can be described, but not defined, as a comprehension of nature as a fluid continuum of mutually inclusive informational (material) and spatial (immaterial) phases in which all form is flow-form, a dynamically receptive-responsive configuration of everywhere in somewhere, with no fixed centre. Natural inclusion is the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context, whereby unique self-identity arises within the context of, not in isolation from natural neighbourhood. Natural communion is the dynamic continuity of all nature in receptive spatial context, where all can be dynamically distinct and distinguishable, but none defined in absolute, independent singularity. With these inclusional understandings, a new science of learning becomes possible that includes the vital space for play in an ever-transforming, context. Evolution is understood as an improvisational process that involves all in diverse dynamic relationship, not a prescriptive process in which only a select few with a hard competitive edge can succeed. Previous concepts, mathematics and language-use founded on suppositions of mutual exclusivity and opposition are radically transformed into a comprehension of all forms as complementary, variably resistive, dynamic local configurations of non-local space. Within the scope of this new science, we can explain our living educational practice in terms of receptively and responsively communicating our evolutionary understanding of life as a gift of natural inclusion in co-creative energy flow, to be held openly and passed on with love and care, not a possession or trophy to be competed for. |
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