7. Time is a Complex Phenomenon

Mar 26, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae. I think people can naturally have a transtemporal consciousness and the mechanistic idea of time as only expressed by a ticking clock can have the effect of dampening such sentience, of lessening the expression of consciousness. I certainly saw that with my secondary students.

I am reminded of autochthonous understandings of time, which are also resonant with an understanding of time within quantum field theory, where deep time of all evolution can be accessed now; it’s not that the past didn’t happen or that time is an illusion, because there are effects on the body of all matter, but it is more a view of how the deep past continues in the present. And filaments of the future to come are also already present now. This is so even with the dynamic indeterminacy of life patterning into being all the time. An example of this tricky transtemporal concept that I like to share with young people is related to the stars we see in the sky. Some of them were active billions of years ago, but we are just experiencing them now as it takes that long for the light to reach us; it is a now of all time as well, not just a slice of time in a linear sense. Indigenous sensibility in sentience engages with deep time this way, with evolution as continuing now. We don’t generally see three million years into the future by looking at the stars though… That is an entirely different thought experiment! 

Memories of Things Yet to Come

Shae. Your comments about developing knowing, and indeed re-membering things-to-come are interesting. It is a kind of future thinking in the same way that you can access the intelligence of your ancestors, way back through your bones and through time… it is not really time travel because it is all now, and the emerging now, but as you say, it is like shifting of focus and frequency. I imagine an antidote to the panic of our own individuality and the drive to ferocious empire building and wealth hoarding is the teaching and learning of complex time that includes the deep time of past and future as threaded through the present. 

To understand individuality in terms of fleeting being, and simultaneously in deep time, past and future – and all of the complexities in between — may release the terror of having to achieve everything in your own lifetime since, truly, you just about flash by in the big time of generations and evolution. I understand from my experience of teaching and learning of complex time that there is a very Western chronophobia, a terror of time, and it can be, needs to be, released. I really believe lots of mental health problems for young people are related to this temporal issue. The ubiquitous nature of mechanistic linear time is not the appropriate temporal environment for humans to thrive. Time appears to be relegated to the background as something that is not thought about much within education, and yet I saw students in a kind of temporal rigidity that froze them from being able to live in the fullness of their lives.

Complex Time

Shae. We need complex time as a foundation for a freedom that is vastly different from the freedom to exploit and exercise power over others. Yes, I believe transformational education requires a strong temporal dimension! One of the four patterns of Complexity Patterning forms a temporal patterning. It engages with the complexity of rhythms and temporalities within our own experience. Using patterns as metaphors assists with engaging in broader sentience, and in this case, with temporal sentience.

Alexander. Yes, understanding complex time is assisted with metaphors, as we don’t normally experience it directly. 

Brown, S. L. (2023). Teaching complex time through pattern thinking and understanding. Time & Society. Special Forum: Teaching Time.

6. Evolution continues

Mar 19, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae. I love your phrase, humaning well. Shawn Wilson explains that the world teaches people how to be human and that we are a young species; we are on the way to learning how to be human. And I would add, how to be sentient patterners in relationship with life, rather than the Western idea that people have arrived at the pinnacle of human evolution already. 

Alexander. The hubris! Goodness!! Just on that point, there is a West African tribe, the Dagari, also called the Dagaaba, in Northwest Ghana and Burkina Faso, that hold that the most advanced beings on this planet are trees, and we humans are far from being the most advanced lifeform. In their cosmology, this makes so much sense: plants can do things we cannot do, like take energy directly from the sun and turn it into matter and energy for their own use. In this way, they can take light and turn it into matter and energy to structure themselves, as well as to function and grow and thrive, and we cannot do any of that. Also, trees do not need to make noise to communicate. They can communicate silently; we have to shout at each other – and we still misinterpret things! And trees do not need to run after their food; they can stand still and process everything that comes to them for their ongoing development and fulfillment. Humans have a long way to go before we can do any of that! So, according to this cosmology, we are not the pinnacle of evolution on Earth – far from it!

Consider the ability of trees to form a forest with such collective intelligence that there are no dry spots or super wet spots: water gets well distributed throughout a forest. The energy conversion that goes on in a forest, harnessing the energy from nature – all done in silence – is an example of how everything in nature that uses high energy conversion is silent. In contrast, when humans engage in high energy conversion processes, it always makes a lot of noise – and has a lot of side-effects, too! Chlorophyll doesn’t make noise; you can listen all you want but you won’t hear anything as it converts sunlight to organic energy and matter. I find it a fascinating cosmovision that views humans as lower than plants and trees on the evolutionary scale. Humbling and at the same time challenging us to “be a part” of the larger picture of things.

To me, it is quite clear that evolution continues. An amoeba has its own sentient capacities: it cannot see, maybe it has some kind of tactile sense and can feel or sense its environment, but if you put it on the computer screen here with us, it’s not going to be like Hi! – it is not going to see us at all. I cannot communicate with the amoeba about Jupiter: no matter what I communicate it will not get Jupiter. It cannot even sense or perceive what Jupiter would be since it simply doesn’t have the sensory apparatus for doing so, let alone the processing capacity. 

According to classical biology, humans have five senses — they just happen to be these five, and we know that bees can see infrared; they can see things we cannot see, dogs can hear things we can’t hear, the same for bats for sure, dogs can smell far more than we can and bears can smell a thousand times more acutely than dogs. It’s awesome that bears go mainly by smell, but some animals in the deep ocean have no eyes at all. They have huge heads and they can produce an electromagnetic field around them allows them to get images like what is produced by a scanning electron microscope, so they see surfaces and topography — that is to say, they “see” with no eyes since it’s a different representation of their environment that they create through this topographical electromagnetic sensing, and though it probably doesn’t extend very far, they can see their immediate environment, and this works well enough for them. We don’t have that sensibility; we aren’t capable of sensing things in that way.  

3 Billion Years From Now?

Alexander. So here is the thought experiment: the amoeba evolved three billion years ago, so imagine three billion years from now into the future. Let’s say life has continued to evolve since there is a definite chance that this will happen. We can’t even imagine what beings that are three billion years more evolved than us would be like — what sensory aparati they might have evolved, how many types of senses they might develop beyond the five we have, and what they might be capable of perceiving.  Just as the amoeba couldn’t imagine us, we can’t imagine what such an evolved being would be like. 

Mathematicians can model eleven dimensions in our universe without it collapsing back into itself (according to superstring M-theory). With computer assistance, we can create geometrical figures that are seven and eight dimensions and possibly even up to eleven, and we can rotate them along different axes. Now, you and I can only see three dimensions of them at a time, as they come into view, so we see this complex object but we can’t see all of it at once; we can only see parts of it because of our three dimensionality… but what if some beings were able to see the all other dimensions. 

It makes sense to me that they could have that capacity to see other dimensional domains that for us, just like for the amoeba, do not exist. I mean we somehow can intuit things, people can have glimpses of other dimensions, but can’t reside in them in a manner of speaking. What hubris it is to say that all we see is the way things are simply because that’s all that we can perceive and process at our current evolutionary level of knowing. Three billion years from now, whatever being is knowing and experiencing other sensibilities might say to us, ‘oh that is the way you think the universe is because you are as evolved to us as an amoeba is to you’. And they wouldn’t be wrong! Currently at three billion years more evolved than amoebas we can’t see that far out, but it is possible to consider that some being might be able to, because we can look back to our evolution of the single-celled amoeba. So, we can look and imagine forward, too. It puts life in perspective when we say this is how the universe works, from our current level of evolution and ability and the current sensory apparati that we have at our disposal to explore how the universe works. I’d suggest that what we think is the universe is probably not all there is to it, but only what we are privileged to access at our current level of evolutionary advancement.

Shae. It is fascinating to think transtemporally in that way. Three billion years. Yes, it’s difficult to even imagine such evolution. Humans as an entire species have only been here in the last few seconds of the twelve hour scale of the world’s evolution. Teaching and learning about complex time are part of Complexity Patterning, although a time-span of billions of years has stretched even my transtemporal thinking. Yes, we cannot even begin to imagine the capacities and tendencies of beings in three million years from now. I’m humbled by the thought, and knowing that my work is a fraction of a microsecond contribution to the evolution of sentience in the present. 

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony.

5. Homo Sapiens Sensorium

Mar 12, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Alexander. Our Daologue on consciousness and sentience reminds me of sensate theory, which is all about the evolution of humans. This framing is inspired by a science fiction series on Netflix called Sense8, where the dominant species of humans are classified as homo sapien sapiens, and an emergent subspecies has arisen called homo sapien sensorium. The idea is that homo sapien sapiens exist and are successful because they can fool each other and themselves and can manipulate and change stories and histories and can twist things to their advantage. All politics depends on this ability. But you can’t do that around homo sapien sensorium anymore because of their sentient awareness; their empathic capacities are so high that they can sense when others deceive or purposely warp and manipulate reality. And this scares the bejeebers out of homo sapiens sapiens, so they set out to exterminate homo sapiens sensorium – at least, that’s the plot of the Sense8 Series.

Shae. I find it fascinating to give a name and sense of evolution to being a broadly sentient empath; one who can feel and know the world more widely. That is exactly why I started engaging my students in deep complexity thinking: I found them frustrated with a reductive approach to engaged inquiry and learning. I think many young people are already complexity aware, already feeling a wider bandwidth of information. Education needs to include all of the dynamics and experiences that a very disciplinary and mechanistic approach tends to ignore. I found the students – all of them — to be far more present when we started acknowledging and engaging with sensory and cognitive awareness of deep complexity, because it includes everything. Nothing is ignored. And it acknowledges that there is always far more happening than most of us are aware of much of the time. Teaching deep complexity thinking and understanding as an embodied and immediate experience acknowledged all relational and power dynamics, which enabled the students to feel safer. 

I wonder if this is opening up a space of the possible for the students to be present within the range of their inherent sentience, and perhaps also open up the way to tune it to wider patterns. 

The Embodied Relationality of Sentience

Alexander. Yes, sentience is a quality, a sensitivity, and I am certain it can be developed or tuned generally. Which reminds me of a martial arts training activity I use in Kids Class. With eyes closed, they learn to sense me coming up silently behind them, and they reach round and grab my hand before I actually touch their shoulder.  They do this with eyes closed but with all of their other senses wide open.  With beginners I rustle my fingers slightly as I move my hand past their ears, but more advanced students can sense me within their field of awareness no matter how silent or stealthy I try to be! Yes, it is a kind of tuning of sentience using what I call the syntony sense.

Shae. I recall a university student in a workshop I was running once stating that the Complexity Patterning experience had created new neural pathways in his brain! I am acutely aware that Indigenous people can experience broad sentience in relationality with the multilevel complexity of their environment, which here in Australia they describe as the living beingness that is Country. I believe this capacity is inherent in all humans and includes the original indigenous tribes of now Western countries. It may have been suppressed in homo sapiens sapiens but it appears to be re-emerging among homo sapiens sensorium – or whatever we are becoming. Perhaps this is a re-evolution, a re-igniting and re-gaining of slumbering or suppressed capacities that are there with us all. 

More Sentience, More Life

Alexander. Humans filter out most of the information we actually experience all the time. We receive a huge amount of information per second, a truly overwhelming amount, but we filter it out so we can focus and move. The thing is, we end up filtering out maybe too much because we are too good at it. So, we can ask the question, what is the price we pay for the filtering? Is what we leave in helpful for us? Is it any good? Is what we leave out needed for us to human well in this day and age? Learning to be Keynote Listeners (and not just Keynote Speakers) on the stage of life is a sense-ability we can consciously encourage and engage with.

Shae. It is interesting to consider that when you expand young people’s sentience — their experienced edges — you also need to give them skills — metacognitive skill — to know what they are doing and to be able to stay in a grounded state. Because expanded sentience needs to be contextually integrated as well as cognitively understood. For your students, the martial arts is the grounded context for tuning and expanding sentience. For my students, patterns are a very simple tool on which to hang that process; to be able to expand sentient awareness and information perception, and then bring it back and then move onto another area of the complexity that is everything. Complexity Patterning provides a very simple cognitive tool and pathway, if you like. Something as simple and visual as ecological patterns is useful to engage fields of information and learn about how it moves and how you can engage with it. It is designed to be adaptable for very young children in the first years of school, which is something I really want to explore. 

Netflix Series Sense8 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense8 [accessed 27 December 2023]

4. Consciousness and Sentience

Mar 5, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae. I’m very interested in your view on the differences and connections between the concepts of consciousness and sentience. I’m wondering if sentience is the awareness and embodied experience of relationality within a dynamic and alive world. I have always felt very porous myself, with the relationality of my being so dynamic across place, elements, and other beings and entities, that I needed to use patterns as a way of understanding what could be described as a kind of embodied and yet distributed dynamic sentience. That is how I first designed Complexity Patterning: to make coherent sense of my own very broad and dynamic relationality. And then it proved to be useful as a transdisciplinary and even postdisciplinary learning approach with students when, as an educator, I was faced with the limitations of formal education. 

Perhaps what I was doing with my students was enhancing capacity for, and experience of, sentience. Engaging with Complexity Patterning served as a means for the students to understand themselves as dynamic complex phenomena, and then to realise their intertwingled relationship within the wider phenomena of the world around them. I wanted to move them out of their individual corners and encourage them to start engaging in the dynamics of connectivity in the classroom. First by making the classroom really safe, so they could relate more with each other — and this process enabled them to move in and out of that, so they could have a little experience of expanded sentience in the classroom — and then move them back into their particular individuality. 

I found it increased the strength of consciousness in the room: it increased the students’ presence, which generated a dynamic of learning commons rather than just individualised competition. Learning increased because there was more awareness in the room; then when we started to engage with the land inside and outside of the classroom and talk about the trees we can see outside, the students started to engage along these dimensions and to just move their sentience outward just a little bit more. And then I would bring them back in again; you cannot leave students to walk out of the classroom in an expanded state, otherwise they might bump into something! We all needed to be grounded. 

I was known as the teacher who got students to breathe through their feet — that’s how I grounded them again, so that they could get on the bus after school. And they all thought that was very funny, but it was effective. I think I was shifting the linearity of experience, because in my understanding of learning, transformational and relational knowledge comes from non-linear, embodied, contextual, and also cross-scale relationship with place, land, trees, everything.

Corners and the Groove

Alexander. Talking about the corners that one can encounter in civilization — which is full of corners and straight lines — there is the difference between a rut and a groove. The groove is where the needle in a record goes and that is where the music is sourced. The expression of the sixties is groovy, being in the groove with a good vibe, but if the experience gets repeated the same way over and over and every day you do the same thing, then it turns into a rut. The rut is where the wheels of a carriage go, and then you cannot get out of that track; you can’t turn because you are locked into that path. Often peoples’ grooves turn into ruts and we can ask, how do you move back out of that?  Where is the aliveness? Where is the energy? How do we bring that movement back into being? I think it relates to the form of our engagement; the way we engage with life. I think it has to do with sentience and consciousness, and asking whether we are conscious of being in a rut or in a groove or are we just being unconscious automatons. You know, that is why a lot of my work these days is how to human well, because when we do not human well, we often machine — then we are in the rut! And cities, and the day-to-day grind, and the incentives of capitalist, materialist society often puts us into ruts of not humaning well. Then we are not nice to each other, to ourselves, to nature, or to anything. So, mastering patterning is a better incentive because it provides a way out: a path to engage the groove of conscious sentience. 

This path is related to empathy. There is a big difference between being an empath and being empathetic.  We can all learn to be more empathetic in school. That is good, but being an empath is different and you don’t choose that: you are born with it. The point I am coming to is that the people with whom I speak who are exploring the edges of consciousness and sentience in a way that is co-emergent with the deeper patterns of life and life-creating dynamics are, in fact, all deep empaths. 

Sentient Empathy

Shae. Are you talking about broad sentience: an empathic embodied experience of the world that includes the experience of more information than what is considered usual?  A wider bandwidth of informational frequency, we might say? This point goes back to the original motivation for my work: to use complexity-focused pattern-thinking in education for the more already multidimensionally oriented students, and the so-called gifted students — as with the empaths — to assist them with the complexity they may be experiencing. So often I come across young people who are already more evolved than contemporary education systems can manage.

I want to open up thinking about complexity and asynchrony and perhaps engage with the students’ experience of not-knowing how to manage the fluidity of their edges and the wider world. This can include experiences of time as a complex phenomenon. When I began teaching, I became aware that many openly empathic and quite multidimensional young people were suffering in schools that were still operating in the outdated Industrial Era paradigm. When I began teaching complexity thinking as an embodied and sentient form of knowledge in my classroom, these students — many of whom had zoned out and shut down — seemed to wake up: the lights came on in their eyes! This happened particularly when I was teaching time as a complex phenomenon to uncouple the students’ lives and living from the linearity of mechanistic temporalities. This work constitutes the core of my contribution to transformational education.

3. Bringing Education into the C21

Feb 27, 2024 | Inquiry Channel

Shae. Education in the Western World needs some serious updating. It is still designed around the linear mechanistic thinking of the Industrial Era. This can generate a relentless linear pressure, causing a lot of stress for students. Michael Alhadeff-Jones explains that as it currently stands, Western education can be damaging to young peoples’ capacity to fully develop cognitively, due to linear temporalities and mechanistic approaches. Perhaps this is why school refusal rates are skyrocketing. I know they are in Australia. An understanding of deep complexity, including that we are complex beings and are connected in so many ways, might be useful for assisting young people to know that they are part of a broader dynamic of complexity.  In my teaching experience, it relieves the relentless pressure of mechanistic linearity. 

The aim of Complexity Patterning is to build students’ capacity for conscious relationality, by tuning consciousness to the broad and dynamic patterning of human embeddedness in the world around us. The Complexity Patterning design and educational strategy has proven to be a way to expand the range of information students are conscious of. Tuning students’ consciousness to the complexity they are, and are a part of, is a useful way forward in transformational education. There is a dynamic and indeterminate quality in complex phenomena as well, and humans certainly are complex phenomena. Patterns are useful here as they can express this paradox of constancy and dynamic change.

four patterns within the Complexity Patterning design.
[Original design: Shae L. Brown]

An Indigenist perspective

Shae. This dynamic quality means that tuning consciousness can’t be put into an absolute algorithm or way of doing things. I think Industrial Era Paradigm education tried to do this through standardisation and linear temporalities. Pattern thinking can support relationality and flexibility as it is also dynamic. There is a contextual salience of patterning rather than a fixedness. Leadership, for example, can move between people; one day one person is leading and another day another person’s skills might be required and can come to the forefront. Any absolute formula for anything is not going to really work in the complexity that is life. 

Alexander. Not very Western of you, I must say.

Shae. Yes, you’re right there! A patterning approach to relationality and complexity is an indigenist way of thinking. It is non-hierarchical in absolute terms, with leadership being emergent and dynamic depending on the situation and the need. The centre is everywhere, and all boundaries are functional and consensual, rather than essentialised, in a patterning ontology. This understanding is congruent with some of the latest views in quantum field physics, such as we see in the work of Meijer and associates.  Interestingly, it is affirmed in Indigenous Knowledge as well, which includes very sophisticated pattern thinking and understanding of complexity, as well as purposeful co-generativity within life’s coming into being, such as in the work of Yunkaporta.

In Flow with Consciousness

Alexander. There is a deeper underlying consciousness that connects. It is not the expression of the Special Case of human consciousness but rather the General Case of the zero-point energy field; the sea of infinite potential out of which all life emerges. Daoism frames it this way as well when it refers to the 10,000 things that emerge out of the One; the potential out of which all things emerge. This is where the mystery and the magic are. I really do think there are components to our engagement with life that bring in spirit. It is something not entirely quantifiable, and actually it is ineffable. That means if we try to express the ineffable we can create dynamics that do not allow for emergence to manifest. As when a poorly applied systems science approach to complexity attempts to use algorithms to average out broader patterns over massive data sets thinking to predict all future states of the universe on the belief that once we have enough variables that we understand and sufficient computing power we will be capable of extrapolating evolutionary dynamics with fidelity. Indeed, this is precisely what the fictional character Hari Seldon set out to do in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy when he established the field of psychohistory as an algorithmic science that allowed the prediction of the future in probabilistic terms.

This extrapolative approach has lost all of its connection to emergence and flow as there is nothing in it that invites listening to the dynamics of generativity, nothing allowing for the dynamics of emergence in the moment — for things that never were, or that never were previously in relationship. Yes, entanglement is considered but it is thought of as able to be calculated, rather than the understanding of living in a sentient universe that itself is alive.

It is in relational emergence that flow is to be found – though not as a ‘thing’ or a state, but as a process to be observed, appreciated, sensed, and participated in.

Shae. Yes, in real-time dynamic patterning.

• Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2017). Time and the rhythms of emancipatory education: Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society. Routledge.
• Asimov, I. (1951). Foundation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
• Brown, S. L. (2023). Complexity Patterning: A patterns-based design and strategy for transformational Education. ISSS Yearbook. Systems Research and Behavioural Science
• Meijer, D. K. F. (2021). The role of guiding harmonic EMF-frequencies in the fabric of reality. In D. K. F. Meijer, F. Ivaldi, J. Diez Faixat & A. Klein (Eds.), Mechanisms for information signalling in the universe: The integral connectivity of the fabric of reality revealed. (pp. 32- 96), Researchgate.
• Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing.