Shae. The concept of paradox — as-well-and, it all depends, it’s relative, with relative parameters — makes a lot of sense in the way I understand life. And… there’s that as-well-and, again… there are important anchor points, like learning to take care of life on our planet.
The Music we Play
Alexander. Two things are connecting for me by way of the evolutionary frame. One in terms of the paradox of fixed and constant, and the other one is the non-linear frame in terms of tunnelling and connecting. People in physics will talk about the second one in terms of wormholes. They are coming up with metaphors to try to explain how things are able to move across distances in a much shorter time than is possible in classical physics. So, yes, in terms of evolutionary framing around fixed and not fixed, if we use the metaphor that the universe is a large cosmic jazz ensemble that has been playing improvisational jazz since time immemorial, and there are different instruments playing and we are always in that patterning of coherence, then at times there will be discord or dissonance and other times there will be flow or consonance.
So, this is the music of the spheres as it’s sometimes called; the evolutionary patterning of all things. When you take this metaphor to the human scale of being, we are all learning to play in this amazing jazz ensemble with everything else that is playing around us. It is just that humans have a knack for being tone-deaf and for not listening very well and wanting to blast out their own tunes without trying to create a greater harmony of expression. But when we learn how to be in greater syntony and flow, we come to understand that the music evolves and changes all the time. It’s improvisational jazz, always changing. Not only that, the instruments in our hands are evolving and changing, too, and in fact even our hands are changing and evolving, so where are the constants? It is all in the flow and warp and weft of the dance. It is all morphing — the instruments, the beings, and even the evolutionary frame, itself.
Broadly Relational Sentience
Alexander. Here is where sentience comes in. I think we can get glimpses beyond the macrodeterministic parameters of our universe, beyond the veil that people like William Blake talk about in poetic terms. This is what happens when we connect with source, or the akashic field, or the implicate order… we do not generally have access to the implicate order, as the explicate order is all that is manifest, in Bohmian terms. But I believe we can access it, just not through direct consciousness engagement, but rather through our sense of accord, through syntony. Tuning and heightening our sense of appropriateness of flow opens a pathway for doing the kind of things that very skilled shamans and learned people might be able to do and that we would say doesn’t quite accord with the parameters of play that we know.
I think this has to do with that aspect of being able to connect through a patterning that underlies everything but is not manifest in our common experience of explicate manifest reality. This is a kind of spatial frame (and there is a temporal frame, as well). Remember when we talked about memories of things yet to come (recuerdos del porvenir in Spanish)? And also about the ability to bring in the frames of being that are actually future frames through a kind of translation or metalation of yet incompletely emerged informational realities. Frames is the wrong word, ways would be better — ways of being… that might be relational ways, or a future relational being that you can reach into. I think the possibility of doing this is inherent in our relationship to space and time that goes beyond strictly linear notions. Stuart Kauffman talks about “the adjacent possible” as a dimensional domain of reality that exists just on the other side of the probability space we inhabit. If we weren’t to have said, thought, moved or done just what we did, we could be there… but then we wouldn’t be in this domain anymore, since it would have become our adjacent possible now. This type of spatial veil has its correlate in the domain of time: the adjacent possible of temporal relations. A transcendent non-linear frame can be engaged, though not necessarily through conscious effort. Nevertheless, perhaps consciousness is required to observe and create the necessary space of the possible for relational multilevel sentience. Putting this stuff into words is a challenge.
Shae. My own experience of the broader frames (though I would say patterns) of relational sentience you are describing, is that it calls for conscious awareness in order to engage and focus, and yet also requires a relaxing into a broadly patterned consciousness. To hold the space of the possible for embodied sentience to tune to wider patterns, including those yet to come. Complexity Patterning is an approach to holding conscious attention on the spatial, temporal, and discursive dynamics occurring, now and possible, in the phenomenon of focus. This then can enable a more expanded sentient relationality and awareness. Complexity Patterning offers a sound foundation.