17. A Sense of Identity and Extended Awareness

Jun 18, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae: How we conceive of individuality and identity is, I think, fundamental to thinking about the teaching and learning of sentient relationality in educational settings. 

Alexander: Yes. The problem is, people say “look at the bees and the insects – they have a hive mind”. People think that a bee or an ant can’t decide to want to go grab an ice-cream or take the afternoon off, maybe go grab a beer. And they’re right about that, but then that gets extrapolated to humans and they get scared. Confusion arises about individuality, about the complexity of human inter-being. In those insect systems, collective identity flows down and through the individual identity, but there is no upward flow of free will for the ants and the bees from the individual to the collective. There is some two-way flow of course, but point is there is not enough to decide to change the system, or to have specific relationships, or to step outside of the hive mind and make purposeful changes. That is the degree of freedom we have as human beings, and we can do that in a both/and way, not an either/or way. We can all be intimately connected as one being and at the same time still preserve our sense of each of us being our own individual being. We can channel switch; we can do both.  It’s the switch from the ego channel to the collective channel. Still, you probably don’t want to be tuned into the collective channel when you are going shopping.

Shae: Precisely! I was having this exact conversation with a friend of mine about expanded states of communion with fields of energy and information, and they said “Yes, that’s a fine goal, but how do you do your shopping?” We both laughed! You can’t walk around and try to go shopping in that expanded state, it’s really tricky. I tried it, some other shoppers found being connected into my expanded and open field of awareness a bit disconcerting! So yes, teaching relational states of being that are extended beyond the hard boundary of separate individualism needs a framework to manage it with care and integrity. Complexity Patterning is designed to be such a framework. Patterns provide a really useful visual approach to understanding who we are – our identity – as a multidimensional patterning that expresses both bounded and agentic individual and deeply connected relational being, across space, and across species, and across time. Complexity Patterning supports a strong and stable individual identity that is at the same time connected – like the roots and branches of a tree – with many others, of all species, and many layers and aspects of the world. 

What I found in education is that students are told to leave everything that is not part of the curriculum at the door, and this also means leaving some of who they are at the door. Learning is still considered an individual phenomenon. I would say to my students, “Bring everything in, all that you are, you are welcome here! Let’s acknowledge all we are, all that is going on, as we are all swimming in an ocean of dynamic energy and information all the time.” I would just normalise the dynamic patterning of being, of everything! Talking about it as normal and legitimate scientific knowledge. This is how I engaged with my students; through the latest ideas in science, so I wasn’t getting any parents complaining that here was somebody doing something a bit unusual with their young people. It needs to be evidence-based, and the science coming through at the moment gives us a wonderful platform for that.

And I found many young people to be very relieved. They would say “Thank goodness we don’t have to pretend!” We could all talk about more than the prescribed content of the curriculum. Using Complexity Patterning helped to engage with those wider dynamics and ways of knowing. My contribution through pattern understanding is to normalise sentience as dynamic fields, not a fixed capacity, and to say to young people, “You already all have this, you can already feel, and are able to tune to information that maybe you can’t see as such.” In this way, they normalise what they have before it solidifies into rigid individuality. 

Alexander:  Yes, because when it does so, it tends to become not trusted, not trustworthy.

Shae: Right, then it becomes something inconceivable. I think educators and students need a language and way of talking about flows and dynamics of energy and information, about the affordances and constraints of it all. To be able to explore the paradox of constraints that enable and enablements that can constrain. I wish I had had an education that engaged with the complexities of energy and information all around us. I remember clearly, at the age of eleven, spending a lot of time carefully figuring out the difference between what I was generating inside my mind, and what I was feeling and experiencing – the information – from outside of me, like a breeze touching my skin, which at that time I thought about as a response. It was hard because no one talked about such things and the Internet wasn’t available then to do my own research. 

Alexander:  It is all wrapped up in our cultural cosmovision, and it has to do with time, and in the very existential idea that we are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone – a very Sartre kind of framing of life [see ref. below]. Well, no we can’t be born alone – at least our mother is definitely present, and we actually live in community on many levels for most of our life. It just depends on what narrative we hold onto. And frankly, even if we are in an ashram or hermitage, we are still not alone since we are always connected to the living earth through the soles of our feet, and through our ancestors to all those who came before us. On some level, we all know this right, and yet there are so many people who feel isolated, desolate and bereft of life, and they create these huge barriers which isolate them further. Certainly, the structures of society can compound this effect, but fundamentally, it is misplaced.

Shae: Yes, and the isolating individuality that you are talking about – how people can get so wrapped up in themselves and withdraw from connection – I see how it can contribute to loneliness and depression, both of which are very common in Western societies, especially among younger and younger people. A deep complexity approach to all of education is my suggestion, my contribution, emphasising and celebrating all levels of connectivity and the dynamic nature of it through a transdisciplinary curriculum operating at the same time as the standard curriculum.

Royalty free image ‘nature-4720090_1280’ author unknown, Pixerbay.

Sartre, J.P. (1946).  Existentialism is a Humanism (trans. from French: L’existentialisme est un humanisme). Les Editions Nagel, Methuen & Co.

16. Equity and Diversity

Jun 11, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae: We were talking in our last Daologue about the conditions needed for living in syntony with our world,

and what might get in the way. I don’t want to give the impression that there are levels of achievement needed to be able to tune in to the universe – or cosmos is the term you use. Achievement, status, and wealth are no guarantees of having or using capacities for sentient relationality. I think there needs to be a shift of thinking about the ideas of getting somewhere in life.  I think it relates to engaging with time as a complex rather than linear phenomenon. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has self/life-realisation at the top, with a linear ladder of levels needing to be satisfied to get there. I recently heard an alternative view, with the suggestion that coherent relationality with life beyond our own egos is not at the top of the hierarchy, but is the ground and foundation for all of the other so-called levels to be fulfilled in a way that supports us. That’s connectivity as fundamental for living well, for humaning well, and for every other area of life. 

Similarly, I don’t want to give the impression that any of us need to be perfectly healed – or perfectly anything – to be able to access the life-giving generativity of relationality with life, with the implicate order. It can be the other way around. Tuning ourselves in a relational way to fields of coherence beyond ourselves can be the source of healing in our bodies and in our lives. I read recently in your articles with Anneloes Smitsman and Sudip Patra [see ref. below] that such frequency tuning to the coherence of the implicate order is actually imperative to heal the destructive trajectory of the human race as a whole.  

Alexander: Indeed. It’s tuning in to a different channel, depending where we are and how far we need to go. Proximate tuning, as though on FM frequencies (with the radio metaphor), is using the ego channel; depth tuning, as though on AM frequencies, is using the Akasha channel.

Shae: Yes, and in my own experience, it is most effective when done in service, with access to knowledge for a purpose. Choosing such relationality and openness, to contribute in some way. 

Which is why any given individual’s relational contribution is no more important than anyone else’s. We are all so incredibly diverse, and all have specific relational patternings to engage and share. For me, the minute someone claims one particular form of the expression of the implicate order as the correct one, they have started a cult. 

Alexander: That’s the ego channel.

Shae: It’s one of the things I appreciate about Australian Indigenous people, as they have a distributed power system that kind of prevented that. Speaking from a place of tuning into wider fields of knowledge is a distributed capacity and no one person has a monopoly on deep relationality or knowledge. Authority is context- and circumstance-based. In the West, we tend to have fixed, individualised experts. In Indigenous communities, being in deep relationality takes a lifetime of learning, and it doesn’t make you more important than the dance that is happening at any given moment. It’s very grounding, very humbling. 

Alexander: Yes! Think about the sun and the moon. The sun does not shine on you because you are good, or decide to not shine on you because you really could do better. It’s not that the sun and the moon are not thinking to themselves, “you ignored me today, so I’m not going to shine on you.” There is none of that. There is just the true expression of the universe – the sun is simply ‘sunning’ – doing its thing. And that is our challenge: how do we express that as humans?  There are so many ways of doing this, and yes this is unity in diversity: unity without uniformity, and diversity without fragmentation. So, to have that diversity without fragmentation – to allow for the diversity, without everyone having to be all the same – this is what I call full-spectrum humaning. So, that is true unity, and therein lies the richness. Because, in the long run, if there isn’t unity in diversity, there is collapse. It’s what Ross Ashby called the Law of Requisite Variety: for a complex adaptive system to persist and evolve with its changing context, it must be equally or more complex than the environment it is in.  In other words, if there are n number of possible destabilizing factors that could lead to potentially critical instabilities in the system, that system will need to have the capacity to generate at least n+1 number of possible responses.  Otherwise, a time will come when it won’t be able to deal with a situation or phenomenon it encounters, and then it collapses or gets wiped out.  This is also known as the First Law of Cybernetics.  So you see, Ashby’s Law is really a call for unity as diversity!

Shae: Yes, diversity as a driver of complexity – and of evolution!

Royalty free image, ‘monk-6113501_1280’ by kanhaiskan, Pixerbay.

• Ashby, W.R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
• Maslow, A., (1943). A theory of motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396.
• Smitsman, A., Patra, S., & Laszlo, A. (2024). Complexity and uncertainty in a word of emergence – part 1. International Journal of Foresight and Innovation. 
• Smitsman, A., Laszlo. A., & Patra, S. (2024). Applying complexity to creative emergence – part 2. International Journal of foresight and Innovation.

15. Tuning into the Cosmos

Jun 4, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae: Life now is so full of noise and distraction. More than ever, as technology brings more information and stimulation that keeps us busy, so that the conditions for tuning ourselves to wider fields of resonance are less likely to “just happen” spontaneously. Making space and time is needed, and it may also be that choosing to engage in practices that assist us to tune our capacities takes choice, and conscious effort. 

Alexander: Yes, although I do think that many of us actually do have experiences of peak connectivity in life. Whether it is a eureka moment, an ah-HA! moment, an insight, or intuition, something comes to us when we are “available”. We have talked previously about being available to this deeper dimension of the cosmos, to the patterning of life, to the information coding from the Akasha.  It is possible to make ourselves more available if we breathe, if we are listening, if we are connected and present and there is some integrity in that engagement, and not if we “problematise” everything. So, this is where I got to with my thinking; that we are like human tuning forks. I am going to use the metaphor of “dialling in” as if we were AM or FM radios, whether we are in the short-range busy-busy FM frequencies of what is going on in my immediate life, or in the longer-range AM frequencies that carry fewer but more powerful signals from the deeper dimensions of time and space.  When we tune to the second kind of frequencies we can receive messages from further away and maybe even from other times, such as when we reflect on something that has us asking “Why did I think that?” or “Where did that come from?” or even “Why did that think me?”

I think of it as consciously choosing practices. This is something that I am thinking of exploring, and now I am wondering how this ties into the idea you mentioned of a healing approach to the challenges we face rather than a problem/solution focused perspective of fixing, and how this might relate to educational frameworks. 

Shae:  Educational settings are a particular challenge, yes. This is a very big subject! Currently educational learning is still somewhat focused on the transfer of information. But change is happening, and engaging with the whole person within their relationship with the world is being seen in a range of initiatives. Healing rather than fixing is an approach from Australian educational scholar Peter Le Breton [see ref. below], who talks about engagement with each other and life beyond facts and representational knowledge of a world out there. Peter recommends the inclusion of emotions and relationships within learning. Which is also the deep complexity approach of teaching and learning with Complexity Patterning based education. As I’m exploring writing curricula with Complexity Patterning, I’m inspired by Peter’s work. I also acknowledge that encouraging students to engage with the world in an embodied and direct way requires care and clear process. I believe that being in a complex patterning of dynamic relationality with the world is healing; it can help us to heal the pain and suffering of both the isolation/unhealthy competition sides of the same coin.

Alexander: When I am truly “available” as we talked about before – in the open conduit channel, that it something different from the “normal” state of being. When people are completely open channels, they may not remember what happened because they are not even there, because they have stepped aside from themselves. They enter a trance-like state – like the Whirling Dervishes of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism, or whatever trance state one can enter – then you are in that flow state with minimal obstructions for the cosmos to flow through. So, as a human variable-tuning-fork, to “tune in” means first checking, “am I in the ego channel or in the conduit channel?” and even then, you can still fine-tune your flow state.  And this is where the question of living beyond words and beyond thoughts comes in again.  Another thing for me, Shae, is that this process doesn’t mean abandoning anything. It is not just being completely passive and expecting something to happen to you. It is more about being in high presence and intensity for something to happen through you. So, it is not at all about “abandoning ship”; it’s about being very present and listening very intensely. This is my inquiry as a pilgrim of the ineffable. 

Shae:  Ah, the idea of experiencing without interpreting… well, interpreting as little as we can, considering we are human beings. From my personal experience working in the healing arts, I think healing is about quietening the noise that is in the body, or reconfiguring the frequency tuning capacities of the human being on all levels.  This can be accomplished by smoothing the effects of past experience that may be continuing to create distraction and noise, noise that may interfere with being able to be present to the immediacy of the flow of connectivity with the world around us, in tune with the flow of information from the implicate order. I’m sure it is a process of re-establishing the coherence that enables connectivity with the generative flow you are describing.

I see that conditions are an important factor here, too. Sustenance and shelter, safety, and time enough to be still, are all necessary conditions to open ourselves to listening, tuning into the coherence of the universe, with other beings such as trees or mountains, or wider realms in time and space. I guess this is why traditionally people who lived in such communion were often in ashrams or monasteries, with reliable rhythms of life with not much external noise or distraction. I’m thinking of the Buddhist conditions for enlightenment. Or in cultures that live with an intimate relationship with life, so as to access it – to become available to it – as just how it is.

What is really interesting is that in today’s world, more people have the material conditions to have some free time, and the knowledge of practices to support tuning ourselves is freely available rather than being esoteric knowledge accessible only to an elite few. Yet, there is also what I see as a cascade of intergenerational trauma that large numbers of people are dealing with. Also, of course there are more distractions than ever, in the instant entertainment of the technosphere, and general life-administration requiring constant attention. There are also layers of complication in the world that constantly pull on our attention. All of these factors can contribute to a kind of “shutting down” to relationship with the world around us.

Alexander: How have we become so separated from ourselves and each other, from the language of Gaia?  Is it largely due to our dependence on technology? Technology can get in the way of energy flows. That’s why I don’t go running in shoes but prefer to run barefooted. You know, we can be separate from nature in so many ways. How do we heal this? How can we cultivate subtle and non-verbal connectivity more consciously, to have this syntony sense in ourselves, with each other, in our society, and perhaps in our education systems? This is a subject that I could explore with you forever! 

Shae: This very big question of “how we might teach an open sentient relationality with life – one that is beyond words – in educational settings?” needs a few more Daologues!  I’m thinking there are many aspects here – many, many, things to consider.

Royalty free image ‘Milky-Way-4451281_1280’ by EvanIT, Pixerbay.

Le Breton, P. (2012). Evoking love in higher education: towards a sustainable future. Journal of conscious evolution, 8(8), Article 4.

14. Making Meaning, and Relational Being

May 28, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Alexander: A subject I have been exploring lately is how we as humans make meaning. The last few weeks I have been thinking about the ways in which we can engage with non-symbolic frames of meaning making and expression. Can we? Yes, clearly, we can engage in non-symbolic forms of meaning making, all I need to do is make a gesture, and I communicate without using any particular symbols or language … well there is a language, but it is not the language of words. This exploration comes from my self-admonition to learn how to live beyond words. What does it mean to live beyond words? I have been feeling recently that words are often a straitjacket; that they constrain our realities. We tend to put them into well-worn channels.  The language of the trees, of the birds, of the waterfalls – there is a language there, and I want to learn to speak that language, to listen to and hear that language more. It is learning Gaia talk.

Shae: As an educator and writer, I am immersed in words. Your subject makes me think of the use and misuse of words, and the limitations of English in particular, and to thinking of direct engagement with the world around us, and with other species. Through our bodies and hearts, our entire being, rather than the one part of the mind that is our constructed knowledge about the world, which is our word- and category-based descriptions. Do we need the curiosity of a beginner’s mind, an open mind, to perceive with relational sentience, rather than coming with what we already know? There is so much communication that happens beyond words, between people as well as between people and the deeply complex and dynamic world all around us. I wonder if the problem is when words are used to limit what we can be aware of, what can be perceived and expressed.

Australian Indigenous peoples have a word, ironically, for such direct relationship of engagement and exchange with Country, with more-than-human beings and life-forms. The word is Dadirri, a way of being and knowing expressed in the work of Ungunmerr-Baumann Miriam-Rose and colleagues [see ref. below]. It means deep listening. Even more, it is a suspension of wording, to engage, to feel, but deeper than the word feeling suggests, it is a way of being-with, that opens us to hear and feel what is beyond the usual use of the individual human senses of seeing, hearing, and feeling. Dadirri is deeper, wider, somehow into and beyond. In my understanding it is opening to meaning that exists between people, and between people and Country. In the world of the Australian Indigenous peoples, the term Country includes multidimensional time, being and becoming, not just the place we a may be, in the western sense of the word. Words just don’t seem to describe it well enough. Especially when I’m trying to describe this Indigenous Knowledge concept with the reductively material language of English!

There is an irony there for me. From when I was living closely with Country for many years, and experiencing the language of the trees, as you say, of the wind and of life generally in terms of resonant flows of energy, information, matter and its own meaning, which I then made meaning of through a visual language using patterns, to my life now, in the word-centred world of academia and education, soon to be writing curriculum to enable young people to feel and relate to the world, and use patterns as a sense making language, beyond the descriptive and representational use of words! I want to bring other ways of knowing into being visible, other than the descriptions and definitions of life in the standard curriculum, and give young people words for diverse ways of engaging and relating to all of life.

Alexander: Yes, everything we are doing at the moment is all in words, and I was thinking about whether we can live beyond words, and that brought me to the question of whether we can live beyond thoughts? There is something liberating in that question, to live beyond thoughts, for me.  What does that mean to live beyond thoughts? So much of the time we are wrapped up in the “monkey mind’, the incessant chatter of our thoughts, and trying to make sense of our world, to formulate the representation, as you say. So here is what I was thinking, if the human brain is a transceiver that bort sends and received information through the holoflux – the in-formation flow between the Implicate Order and the Explicate Order, which is what David Bohm and Karl Pribram called the holomovement or the holoflux – then we as whole systems are transducers between the implicate and the explicate. Like, you can take apart the television but you are not going to find little people in there acting things out, even though you see it on the screen. 

In the same way we are finding, and it is no longer even new, that in our brains we don’t actually have thoughts or keep memories. They’re not located there; they are accessed since the brain is a transceiver, it’s a read/write transceiver sending and receiving information into and out of the Akashic field, or the implicate order, if you prefer. However, the brain is only a transceiver – an antenna – and life requires our whole being to transduce what is received into embodied expression. As a specialized transceptive organ, the brain can “tune into” different aspects of the Akasha, acting as a kind of rheostat, not like a fixed transceiver, but more like one with range of reception and transmission, allowing us to tune differently, like a variable tuning fork. I realize I am mixing my metaphors a bit here. Anyway, it’s not literally like an antenna, but the metaphor is still about tuning into the resonant frequencies that derive from the Akashic dimension, or from the implicate order, or however we want to put it.  So, how do we tune?  For me, the challenge of humaning well is that of being a conduit for the cosmos to flow though me with the highest fidelity and the lowest noise and static. Noise and static derive from my preconceptions, or if I am distracted, or if I have a fixed model for what it is I am trying to figure out. If I am trying to figure out something rather than letting it inform me, and if I am second-guessing things and not allowing them to flow, then I am blocking information flow from the cosmos or clouding it with ego, with expectation, with judgement.  Then I am not humaning well; not being a true conduit for the cosmos to express. There is obstruction there since my expression doesn’t have the highest fidelity of transmitted flow due to this blockage or clouding by ego. 

Shae: Interesting. As an educator, I teach thinking. I like to do so as thinking with, rather than the illusory objectivity of thinking about. That is, thinking with discernment, thinking with awareness, and thinking with relationship; a deep complexity approach to thinking. 

So, for not thinking, I understand that many spiritual traditions include meditation and other techniques to quieten the mind, to then be open to relational engagement with life in the way that you are describing. Many diverse cultures have practices for moving beyond everyday individuality to participate in broader patternings of mind, with each other and the more-than-human world. If we can open our capacity to be-with the world, maybe we can hear and feel energy and information from a range of sources. Yes, so for me it is a differentiation between thinking about, and thinking-with – a kind of being-with; a relational syntony.

I see it as a deeply embodied way of being and way of knowing. I also think it is in fact a natural way for human beings. There was a narrowing of allowable perception that occurred during the Enlightenment in Western thinking, with neocortical reasoning and representational thinking as the only accepted loci for reality formation – you know, as with Descartes’ I think therefore I am. And yet, many great thinkers, philosophers, and scientists have described ideas coming from intuition and creative pondering. So, if we are engaging with the whole of our own being, with heart, and skin, and emotions and all of our subtle capacities for listening and knowing, we may be able to engage without words and categories dominating our experience. 

My daughter surfs in Australia, and we have talked about how surfing can generate this kind of experience. With body, heart, mind, and soul in flow with the dynamic motion and life of the ocean. I believe you need to let go of thinking and move with it, pattern-with. More like I am being-with, therefore I am.

Royalty free image ‘girl-5662898_1280’ by Digitallife, Pixerbay.

Bohm, D. (2005). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.
Ungunmerr-Baumann, M.R., Groom, R.A., Schuberg, E.L., Atkinson, J., Atkinson, C., Wallace, R., and Morris, G. (2022). Dadirri: An Indigenous place-based research methodology. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 18(1), 94-103.

13. The Evolution of Transformational Education

May 7, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Alexander. There is a progression talked about in educational systems where you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence to unconscious competence. That last level is when you are in flow, but that is not the highest engagement because unconscious competence is still a form of abdication, if you will; an eschewing of the co-creative relationship. You are letting yourself be completely flowed by the moment, without appreciating how “I am the co-creator of this moment,” too. In the martial arts, that is particularly dangerous, because if you are engaged with flow in the moment — and you can be engaged in a way that you can have such a beautiful dance with your sparring partner that your actions are in complete flow of the moment — then if you abandon all oversight, things can happen that you may not have wished to occur.  People can get hurt — just because you are in that state of unconscious competence and let the moment move you one-hundred percent. I have had instructors who say that is the highest point of the practice; when you enter into a state where you are no longer responsible for your actions. I wonder if there is a desire in the world for this sort of transcendence, this abdication and absolute neutrality that removes us from co-generative responsibility. It doesn’t seem to be alive, present, filled with syntony or love. At least, to me, that’s not attractive and not a goal or state of being to which I aspire.

Embracing being Human 

Alexander. So, this sort of transcendence that asks us to forget our humanity is not the answer. We must always be truly, deeply, fully, and even passionately human. No matter the calling, we must always care and be present.  To say, “well, I’m just going to be in the flow,” or to offer the justification that, “well, certainly in martial arts can be dangerous,” as reasons to allow yourself to do things – or even think or intend things – that aren’t grounded and informed by humankindness means to abandon the evolutionary quest of syntony. Letting go of the rudder or the steering wheel and trusting that the universe will be responsible for the outcome is taking flow too far and allowing things to spin out of control. In sailing, you have the notion of pitch and yaw. Pitch is the up and down motion yaw is side-to-side. Things can start to wobble and get out of balance because there is always a slight imperfection in the movements. When we start to move very fast the wobble will appear very quickly.  There are also the centripetal and centrifugal flows of movement. These are the things that will be expressed when you ramp up a system into higher flow rates!   

For me, that is the difference between a Buddhist and Daoist approach, for example. In Zen Buddhism, for instance, the focus is precisely to let go and flow, in complete harmony with the universe. If death is part of the flow of the moment, then death is part of it. The Daoist approach would be more to focus on how to harmonise these flows for the greatest goodness. That is subjective of course, but the idea is to foster dynamics that emerge the greatest healthy patterning for all concerned. And that, for me, is the core of syntony. As such, it is much more Daoist than Zen Buddhist. There is an interest in creating an alchemy of flow. If things are off, you seek to create harmony — not just to say, “well, that’s what is; if it’s off, let it be off”.  Instead, the impulse is to explore, “how can we create a greater harmony of flow?” I think that is a healthy role for humans to engage with – not only to be the connectors of life with life, but also to be the augmenters of the dynamics of coherent emergence — a coherence that represents health, vitality, thrivability, and aliveness for individuals, communities, societies and for all living environments.

The Space of the Possible and the Flow

Alexander. I see that is what you are doing with Complexity Patterning when you are in the classroom; you enable flow. You are not telling students how to flow but rather you help create the space of the possible in which they can practice alignment, practice flow, practice syntony. They also get to practice discernment among those things with which they align so as to distinguish between things that are not healthy and things that are, where what is considered healthy is always a function of the embedding context, what I refer to as the Syntony Spheres. 

Shae.  Yes, Complexity Patterning engages with constraint and enablement, which are very paradoxical. As we have seen, constraint can be a good thing, but too much of it may not be a good thing. Similarly, enablement is a good thing, but likewise too much can get a little bit tricky. I use these concepts for discernment and engaging with some ethical understanding of agency, engagement, and responsible co-creative relationship. This includes the balance of freedom and responsibility, and individuality and community. These concepts are paradoxical rather than creating certainties and absolutes. They thereby avoid the reductive approaches of dogma whilst encouraging co-generative relationship with and within the dynamics of the complexity of life. 

We have covered wide fields of considerations for transformational education. There is so much for me to think about. Lots to ponder. I feel inspired. 

Alexander. I appreciate our Daologues, Shae. I benefit immensely from engaging with so many concepts and perspectives and terms, but mainly from gaining perspectives that I have found tremendously enriching for me. And I am hopeful, because the work you are doing bridges paradigms, and that’s not easy to do. Your work is bridging education, consciousness, evolution, and sentience, four strong domains!  I look forward to where our Daologue will take us next.

• Brown, S. L. (2023). Complexity Patterning: A patterns-based design and strategy for transformational Education. ISSS Yearbook. Systems Research and Behavioural Science 
• Brown, S. L. (2023). Complexity Patterning: A language and strategy for the teaching and learning of complexity competence. Journal of the International Society of Systems Science. 66(1). 66th Annual Conference Proceedings, 2022. 1-20.
• Brown, S. L. (2021). Complexity Patterning: A patterns-based approach to the teaching and learning of complexity competence. [Thesis. Southern Cross University].
• Kauffman, S. A. (2019). A world beyond physics: The emergence and evolution of life. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Laszlo, A. (2019) Education for the future: The emerging paradigm of thrivable education. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research 75(3), 174-183.
• Laszlo, A. (2020). Connecting to the holotropic quantum universe – Developing holotropism in ourselves. In E. Laszlo (Ed.). Reconnecting to the source: The new science of spiritual experience, how it can change you, and how it can transform the world. St. Martins Essentials.