From rupture to regeneration
We are melting back into the embrace that never releases us, re-enchanting ourselves with nature’s encompassing eros—restoring integration, flow, and our capacity to meet the needs of life and world.
So let go. Jump in…
Whatcha waiting for? It's alright
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
Let go, Frou Frou
My connection with nature has gone through wild life stages, from magical youth, through mechanical science and out into universal entireness, alignment. Undoubtedly, yours has too: times when a quantum state of ‘I am time and all is no time’ defines your presence. No matter how momentary that may or may not have been.
I find my journey with this both deeply congruent and profoundly bizarre. Reality frameworks, to make sense of this, are a foundational help. When we know what we are doing and why, the how and having this consciously becomes easier. That’s potent as this descent out of connection mirrors a predominant disharmony of our modern day world.
That’s to say we’re all one and unique individuals too. Yet individual identity is our society norm. We privilege ourselves as dispassionate observers: categorising and understanding through reducing everything to its constituent elements. Which is a modern day success story, a mirage of half sight, and a sticky glue pond of modern narratives limiting us from wholeness.
At the same time that pond is drying and cracking; it is more fragile than ever.
We feel, sense and intuit this opening as much as look to conceptually understand it. Thus, this is the journey as a story and a playlist with theory relegated to the footnotes.1
Part I: The descent—a great unraveling
Unconscious unity—3 year old
A' ghrian 's i 'g èirigh [ The sun she is rising ] O na-lyi vo he
S i gun smal oirre [ She is without blemish ] O na-lyi vo ho
S i gun smal oirre O na-lyi vo ho
Na air na reultan [ Amongst the stars ] O na-lyi vo ho
O na-lyi vo he
Tàladh Dhòmhnaill Ghuirm, Kim Carnie
I’m in a vividly alive world. Not bound by the conventional, the expected. Wild entities appear regularly:
sometimes as felt sense—the presences of others around me;
sometimes as total absences—everyone else who was just here are gone; and,
sometimes as full visual part beings—talking and responding.
A leg extends from the ceiling. Not just any leg: female, full fishnet stockings, high red stiletto heeled shoe framing the arch of her foot, poising her calf and lower thigh before me. I can see no further she’s extending above the ceiling. Her second leg steps in too. Matching stiletto and fishnets, alluring grounded pose.
Sultrily, she invites me in, climb up, undeniably sensual and carnal, I’m as much feeling as her as I’m feeling myself, drawn in with perineum pull.
She encourages me further, come on, climb up. a long graceful index finger now gesturing me in, hand and wrist motioning me forward too, promising a seductively warm touch, or rather more touch, there’s a full sense of suggestive.
My encounter mirrors our enchanted world. One-ness has a pulsation, so much of what is around is sensual, a penetration, an inter-tangling, liminal incarnate realities, naive ease, perceptions flow in and as nature: at this age we are only just separated from the world around and the closeness, voluptuous embrace in and as all of it.
Realities:
The magical is adjacent, populated with imaginary friends, while feeling and sensing the world and other beings. There’s a conventional explanation, a.k.a. it’s not ‘real’.
The experience and existence is real. She is para-physical and intra-pshycic: It’s Scotland and there is a rich cultural story here including sídhe. And maybe she’s emerged from my mind too, including Indian sub-continental heritage, and gained independence like a Tulpa.2
She is an autonomous being. She’s real and in service of me finding and experiencing something individually separate from my earlier childhood, my developmental state when I was everything. I’m exploring with dialogue, intimacy & companionship what was previously just a universal bliss-allness baby state. 3
From across time now:
This feels like stars sparkling in me, effervescence, and me sparkling, embodied on the world.
First wound—5 year old
Tha rud shìos anns a charaidh [ There's something in the fish-trap ]
Da thàbh air an fharaidh [ Two spoon-nets in the loft ]
Tha rud aig an fhaoileig [ The seagull has a catch ]
Hùg Air A' Bhonaid Mhòir, Julie Fowlis
I’m five and I run around the house collecting all the aerosol cans. I’m responding to pain, energised by feeling multitudinous beings, the difficulties spray from the cans will embed, and their infinity of gratefulness as I act.
Except I don’t say this.
I present the spray cans to my parents. I tell them they can’t use them as CFCs are making holes in the sky.4
Yes, I’m a science nerd even at an early age. However, I’m drawn to the science that connects, that helps me make sense of how parts work in a whole: Species in our world. Ourselves in the universe.
Which is the wound.
My response to the cans is intuitive and from wholeness.
My capacity to express that is only in a way I will be admired, rational science. Intuition, Fact and Emotion is flattened into a rigour of orderly thinking.
Paradoxically, intuition got me here and I’m rewarded for hiding this—my parents respond to the rational. They stop using aerosols, substituting in other products.
Sadly, I intuitively know not to try this at my friend’s house across the street. Logic wasn’t going to work there.
There is a flattening of inner colour, more grey alongside a sharpness to the lines, clarity and definition albeit in black and white.
Realities:
I’m not far, as a five year old, from magical developmental awareness, from making sense of myself and the world around me in terms of everything is ‘real’. Albeit, I’ve distinguished species, entities and myself as independent beings. Yet, the resonance of everything is one, we’re all one, is very present.
This is our essential human superpower. We learn through mimicry, empathic identification with the other. Paradoxically, as we’re doing this through our imagination we’re enabling our individuality too. This is inherently activating different ideas, diffractions of alignment and dissonance in us from how other’s are experiencing themselves/itselves.5If analysing everything into its constituent components delivered change we’d have long ago addressed biodiversity priorities, climate, wealth inequality and so much more. Intuitively I knew this wouldn’t work with, for example, my friends parents. I didn’t try it in his home. I privileged left brain analytical outcomes in my home and was rewarded for it. The more holistic view, incorporating at least our inner worlds and resonance of emotional resources, misses out along with the potential for deeper and wider impact in other’s homes.6
From across time now:
This feels like power and pride, five year old chest puffed up leading forward.
Newtonian Dissonance
all that’s golden
is never real
and I won’t play fair…
you go too far
By the throat, Chvrches
There’s a hardness to my world. I’m 14 and my family and I are now in Glasgow, We’ve left the far north of Scotland, days lived outside, winding through gentle streets to hidden meadows, backyards that swallow me around corners into fantastic castles of insects and bumble bees.
Glasgow, on the other hand, is grey. Black soot coats all the buildings, absorbs all the light.7 It was an industrial town except the coal mines, shipbuilding and steelmaking are all shutting down. That’s stress, difficulty and hardship for many families.
Sadly, nobody finds a way of talking about that to children, to me. The violence all around is kids reflecting their home-lives, modelling parents and stress, bringing that into school and onto the streets to perpetrate it on others. Compassion seemingly doesn’t coexist with the prevailing rationality ‘there is no alternative’.8
The safest route is to shut down, go grey, be largely unseen. If other’s are not talking about emotions then don’t show them either. I don’t see empathy for others. I don't meet people joyfully exploring woods and nature. Rather the woods become a place to escape. The aliveness, all species-experiencing-sensing, is backgrounded, squashed into the mud of the trails: it rains a lot in Western Scotland!
Yet, reduce one thing and others grow to compensate. For me it is cognitive intelligence and vibrant imaginary worlds. Science can be a saviour. Externally I’m steering myself towards this at school. Internally, avidly in science fiction relationships, who needs to be in Glasgow when there are nebula to explore, ring-world ecologies and we can found new civilisations!
Realities:
I and we take on the mindsets of the world around us. That is the full expanse of these:
→ What I feel from the world around me—empathy with it, where values resonate and connectedness-relatedness;
→ What I sense—directly through physical senses and in embodiment-perceptual shifts aligning & reacting to people and things around me;
→ What I intuit—from the patterns, possibility and unseen connections all around e.g. intuitively walking an alternative route that feels safer; and,
→ Through thinking—reflecting, taking stock of physical and relationship structures and analysing this.
And the thinking is very mechanical: Here’s the rules. E.g. formally as they are at school and informally as I’m expected to be by my school class. It feels like an emotional dessert. Unsurprisingly I reinforce that and retreat to thinking.9Our modern world privileges the thinking framework. Logic, objective analysis, and cause-and-effect relationships. In Glasgow, at this time, economic-rationalism and the pain it’s causing is justified otherwise anarchism, communism and socialism will take over.10
We are mimicking the behaviour of those around us, fictional or physical. That’s foundational for us to form intentions and aspiration, to motivate attraction and empathy. Even when that empathy is to feel danger and organise safer ways of being such as hide in the woods. Paradoxically, however, that intuition through imitation is opening our options to be different.11
From across time now:
This feels like growth, internally far more vibrant and alive than the physical muddy city and woods seemed.
Coming soon: Part II, The Nadir—simultaneity states & Part III, Ascent
Technicolor 20s! I’ve walked into a world of wonder, palms and rainforest, second day out, less than an hour from the airport. Can this really be a city? By the end of the week, sailing from Sydney, I’ve reached the reef; Lord Howe island. I’m surrounded by shoals of tropical fish, synchronising waves as helios rainbow murmurations. They’re flowing away, from, and with my hands as I stroke underwater following the reef.
It blows my mind. I’m enclosed by make-believe, or so the world of Jacques Cousteau had seemed. Now I’m swimming in it, the vibrancy, abundance and aliveness of it all. Thrilled, entranced, wide eyed in wonder.
It’s like a whole new universe and a viewquake.
Oh, if this joy and awe had been held more consciously…
Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
I recommend listening to this article’s songs: Re-enchantment playlist >. Not the least as nearly everyone I know struggles with Scottish Gaelic pronunciation. It’s much more poetic sung by the artists :-)
Statistics, numbers and evidence are in the footnotes letting the main body—story and realities—be felt, more easily. That’s grounded in the idea of that our mental constructions, imagination and visualisations are significant. They are at the foundation of our human superpowers, we can and do feel as the other humans, species, entities and wholes around us. Paradoxically, doing that increase our individuality, at the very heart of this is differentiating ourselves by feeling empathy with and as another. Imagining others creates our individuality enhancing both remembering one-ness (we are all one) and self identities.
See Iain McGilchrist Master and Emissary, particularly chapter 7, for much more deep beauty about empathy and imaginations’ foundational roles. Amazon & Public Library
Feeling the difference between ourselves and others is a classic examples of being confronted by a reality which does not make sense from my existing normalised perspectives. That disequilibrium in our meaning-making systems catalyses the stage and state paradigm shifts referenced throughout the footnotes and usually numbered (1, 2, 3 etc.) from
’s beautiful Core, Robert Kegan’s Subject-Object framework and sometimes, particularly for earlier childhood states, drawing on Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. See Cynthia McCauley, Constructive developmental theory, for an overview.…this pond is drying and cracking…
One of my favourite illustrations of our awakening is via John Vervaeke: 30 to 40% of people experience this, reaching towards an entireness with everything sense of self being part of the senses of profound at-one-ment, or even more at-once-ment. See Peak Nature footnote 3
Otto Scharmer writes delightfully about this too saying “the boundary has collapsed. Remember the sky-gazing moment. The leader’s self and the system are not separate; they are one and the same. Your body in a moment of contemplative sky gazing is one with the earth body you are lying on. The boundary between them has disappeared.”
The three parts of this article are scenes in Act 3, of The Rascal, The Mongrel and The Seeker:
Act 1, the rascal:
Scene 1 is The rascals immunity
Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?
Act 2, the mongrel:
Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Scene 2 is Western logic
Scene 3 is Unfolding realities
Scene 4 is The red pill
Act 3, the seeker:
Scene 1 is Bondi bend
Scene 2 is this article, From rupture to regeneration
There is one interlude: That rascal. Got me
That is she is ontologically indeterminate, energetically objective, like a sídhe—an ethereal somewhat otherworldly-like being from Scottish experiences. And/or she is intrapsychic like a Tulpa. Both describe a sentient being, the latter generated through concentrated imagination with its roots in Tibetan Buddhist practices.
For more on ontological indeterminacy see Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Our wild kosoms. pdf
This is Agentic Realism: She’s emerged/exists through our intra-actions. It’s a quantum social science framework from Karen Barad. In this space, in this time, this is real for us. Our separation and these existences are enacted within the event and place. I could think of this as that reality always exists and is chosen/co-created at this moment of ‘measurement’. See Meeting the universe halfway, Amazon & Public library
Additionally, it’s ascribing purpose to the universe, at least as a probability enhancing machine, acting to increase the likelihood that more complexity and higher functioning emerges from disparate parts. E.g. life on earth is likely not accidental. We’re part of a cosmic evolutionary unfolding not just pure chance. Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness, Amazon & Public library
That can be extended with the First Principles and First Values framework: the universe desires ever greater wholeness, deeper contact. Consequently, that shared reality (us as individuals and us as one, the universe) is: a universal eros (that feels like a conception spiral, a becoming of all, like emerging through the eye of the needle); and, an evolutionary impulse privileging intimacy. The sensual and intimate realities of my 3 year old individual experience mirror the universe’s eros, all being bliss in oneness. See David J. Temple First Principles and First Values (David is a collaboration of 3 writers, Ken Wilbur, Marc Gafni and Zak Stein). Amazon & Public Library
The developmental step is exploring separating myself from everything is me. That is from a stage 1 impulsive: what I experience is me and I sensually feel that, to stage 2 heroic: if I climbed up her leg things would change and there’s a visceral felt sense of skin contact with her.
Some years later, in 1987, the Montreal Protocol came into force. It’s an international treaty to protect the Earth's ozone layer by banning the production and use of ozone-depleting substances including Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
Iain McGilchrist’s Master and Emissary is a phenomenally insightful source for this. Amazon & Public Library. Particularly see Chapter 7, Imitation and the evolution of culture.
The why: Why should I or all of us care about an ozone hole? The public narrative on this, in Australia, was protection from skin cancer. Emotionally it’s motivating from personal fears, skin cancer and cataracts, alongside harm to ecosystems and human moral responsibility to rectify damage caused by ourselves.
Those latter two elements, ecosystems and human damage, are very much factors amplified and driven by climate change, biodiversity loss and income inequality (see Western Logic for more links of inequality).
Leaving out half the story, the largely absent right brain—the wound that is being made here—is setting aside emotional, moral and unitative subtle perspectives. That is part of the difficulty around collective action to address these bigger, deeper systemic global problems. If we don’t feel that, and the wholeness of the problem such as the ecosystems and human moral responsibilities in the ozone hole example, our capacity to meet this creatively and together is inhibited.
There is no alternative is associated with Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the UK and a driving force behind shutting Glasgows shipyards, coalminers and steelmaking. More>
This is the socialised stage of human development, 3. It’s a privileging of relationships and the expectations of others. I’ve become Subject to that, calculating unconsciously how to be and do even when this means withdrawing from warmth, joy and connection in nature. My identity is fused with the social context around it and, as I don’t fit in, I have not grown up here, that is rather isolating.
There’s a desire to belong too. Surely if I am just even more dispassionate that might work? Hence I privilege thinking even more. And ouch, there is a potential for genuine empathy now, to feel with another person, put myself in another's shoes, feel what they are feeling. Except the environment around has no apparent handrails to enable this. The school is stuck in a model of ‘control’, pupils are to do what they are told. Many students home lives, parent out of work, are troubled.
In many ways the internal dissonance of this is pushing me towards self-authoring, stage 4 of human development. I need an internal value system, ethical structure that allows me to navigate and make choices about my relationships, rather than being defined by them & cutting off from the difficult interactions all around.
We can and do have bigger thinking systems views, at least embracing some of the second order effects, in modern society. These include: social determinants of health; cost of lost human ingenuity and productivity from stress and difficult social environments'; and, mechanisms to value externalities such as carbon pricing etc.
Including inner development and our inner mindsets and perspectives is a key transformational step for these to have the impact that rational arguments demonstrate should occur. This is proliferating. e.g. see Inner Development Goals, skills and qualities that help us to live purposeful, sustainable, and productive lives, here>
“We are indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings”. Theodor Adorno quoted in Master and Emissary. Amazon & Public Library
For the role fiction plays, increasing our social and moral capacities, NIH is a good overview.