Self and Meta-Self / Individual and Community

[Harrison Owen]

One of the curious things about Open Space -- or at least the experience of Open Space -- is the apparently conflicted notions of "self" and "community" flow easily and naturally together. Folks often report that they never had felt so respected/honored/perceived as a person. And simultaneously the awareness of the collective (may I dare say -- community?) is almost overwhelming. It never seems to be the case that individuality must be sacrificed for the whole or that the whole is simply an assembly of individuals. It has often occurred to me that the "problem" of individual and community is less a function of our experience than our logic. Or maybe our logic forces a false distinction so that we expect the individual to be in conflict with community? This is the logic of "either/or" -- and not both/and. It is a logic dominated by an awareness of contradiction as opposed to paradox -- and somehow all paradoxes are thought to be contradictory and therefore to be resolved and eliminated. 

Alan Rayner, the developer and proponent of what he calls Inculsionality, has done some interesting work in this area, and writes as follows: 
"Using inclusional logic, however, the isolation of the simple, fixed notion of self becomes subsumed by the togetherness of complex, dynamic forms (in effect 'flow forms') comprising inner, outer and intermediary spatial domains, all of which are vital to their distinct, but not discrete, identities. Rather than being unitary or binary, ecocentric or egocentric, such 'complex selves' represent ternary couplings of inner with outer, of the kind alluded to by Shakunle's 'fluid logic numbers' (see above). Their behaviour is therefore ultimately intractable to impositional logic, as was implicitly acknowledged by Newton 'himself' in his analysis of the 'three body problem' (Montgomery, 2001). Moreover, this behaviour can neither be regarded as intrinsically 'selfish' nor 'altruistic', because neither the disregard of the outer ('collective'/ 'we') nor inner ('individual'/'I') aspect is evolutionarily sustainable in such a co-creative system." 

The language is a little turgid I guess -- but I find the notions appealing.



Harrison


Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD  20854
USA
301-365-2093
207-763-3261 (summer)
website www.openspaceworld.com


*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20050823/34a56ed6/attachment-0015.htm>