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.