This is a retrospective of week 14, 2024 (2024-04-01–2024-04-07).
My first grandchild, Alice, was born on April 2nd. Below is my drawing of her hand. I am moved to tears when I see her and I am grateful that everything went well. Here is also another drawing of Alice.
I found the following quote the same day Alice was born while reading Matthew Segall’s Crossing the Threshold:
We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. … Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
—Alan Watts, The Book, p. 9
I started reading the following books this week:
- Alternative to Therapy: A Creative Lecture Series on Process Work by Amy Mindell. Mindell writes: “…I began to realize how important it was to develop a greater subtlety in my work. …the uniqueness of each…situation demanded much more refinement of my methods and my understanding of myself… As I began to study these subtleties, I also unearthed a number of key principles that lie at the root of the work.” Amy Mindell also notes that: “Without the right feeling-attitude, in particular, a good deal of heartfulness and feeling for those we work with, even the best method will sink into the sea like a ship with holes.”
- VISTA: Life and getting where you want to be by Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolution Biologist and Futurist. This is a free e-book, which can be downloaded here.
- Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead by Matthew Segall. Segall writes: “Instead of approaching Schelling and Whitehead’s ideas as a museum curator or historian of philosophy, the chapters to follow record my attempt to think with them in the present, as though we were friends engaged in dialogue.”
I also listened to this interview with Matthew Segall during the week. Matthew Segall says (my emphasis in italics):
It turns out that imagining nature as a machine ends up doing great damage.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=1103
This thinking activity that we can’t quite capture, but that we know that we are, or that we are performing, is itself the source of this illusion of a thing in itself out there.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=1950
[Shelling says] nature has its own interiority and its own creative core. And so Shelling says we could just as easily flip it and say that our human self-consciousness and thinking activity is an intensification of something that nature’s always been doing.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=2033
For Whitehead, … every actual entity, from the quantum up to the galactic and beyond of whatever scale, is this process of experience, whereby the past grows together to form a new moment of experience in the present, which then launches itself into the future. … The way that we know the world from moment to moment is continuous with the way that we strive to affect the future from moment to moment.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=2368
There’s both a way in which we need to decenter the human being, and a way in which I think the anthropos needs to be recognized as central.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=3113
Kant’s question was basically, what is the human mind such that nature could appear to it in the way that it does? And Shelling inverts that picture and says, what is nature such that mind could have emerged from it?
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=3700
To the extent that nature is imagined as a mere machine, and mind is imagined as this external observer upon that machine, … we’re going to have a merely external view of something that also has an inside. And if we can’t include the contributions at the causal level of that interiority, then we’re only going to be understanding nature in terms of finished form, and we’re going to lack an understanding of nature as a process of formation. And we can understand the mineral world, the inorganic physical world, decently well just as a bunch of finished forms. It’s why math works so well in physics, but to try to understand the living world—whether single cells or plants or animals or human beings—just as a collection of finished forms, obeying fixed laws, doesn’t work. So until we can cultivate this other way of knowing, and see how we can participate in the the formative process, I think we’re going to be locked into a very limited form of science, that’s not only limited in the sense of not letting us fully understand how nature works, but it’s limited in the sense that through its technological applications we’re actually destroying the world.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=4329
There is value in being understood by non-philosophers.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=6208
I think…we do have other perceptual capacities that we have not in our…modern western civilization been encouraged to develop. And I think that love is not just a sentiment, it’s not just an animal instinct, it’s potentially an organ of perception. … We need to first accept that it’s possible that we could perceive with the heart, and then it’s going to take a lot of work to actually exercise that muscle to the point that it can work well.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=6949
All of it stems from human beings being able to cultivate this heart muscle, and this new center of gravity, so that we’re not off balance… This is another emphasis on how do we renew the world together in the most loving and wise way that we can?
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=7751
Somewhat unexpectedly, I also received an email from Tom Atlee regarding my review of his new book. Atlee asks (my emphasis in italics):
I have one concern and question. You say “Tom Atlee describes co-intelligence as follows:” and then quote a long description of what INTELLIGENCE looks like from the co-intelligence perspective. That made me curious about what you see as the difference between intelligence and co-intelligence – and how I might make that distinction clearer.
—Tom Atlee, Mail April 2, 2024
I replied that:
Co-intelligence, for me, is the ability to act intelligently together—not only together with other people, but together with all of life (this is where the wholeness comes into play). What does it mean, then, to act intelligently? Well, I think that all living organisms are intelligent, even plants. Plants, for example, are not only alive, they are cognitive, they are sentient, they experience the world, they have memory, they learn—in short, they are intelligent.
—Jan Höglund, Mail April 3, 2024
I also mentioned that I have my own concern and question:
You mention in the book that you’ve created two pattern languages, one on group process and one on wise democracy.
—Jan Höglund, Mail April 3, 2024
Christopher Alexander realized that you cannot make a building live—even with the help of a pattern language (C. Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, pp. 543–44). He came, somewhat paradoxically, to the conclusion that “[i]t is only a question of whether you will allow yourself to be ordinary, and to do what comes naturally to you, and what seems most sensible, to your heart, always to your heart, not to the images which false learning has coated on your mind” (Ibid., p. 547).
How do you see this in relation to your pattern languages?
Maybe we can be intelligent together with our hearts, but it’s going to take a lot of work to actually exercise that muscle to the point that it can work well—with the help of patterns or whatever?
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