Self and Meta-Self / Individual and Community

[Karen Sella]

Harrison, your post below reminds me of this quote:
 
"We stand in a turmoil of contradictions without having the faintest
idea how to handle them: Law/Freedom; Rich/Poor; Right/Left;
Love/Hate---the list seems endless.  Paradox lives and moves in this
realm; it is the art of balancing opposites in such a way that they do
not cancel each other but shoot sparks of light across their points of
polarity.  It looks at our desperate either/ors and tells us they are
really both/ands-that life is larger than any of our concepts and can,
if we let it, embrace our contradictions."   -- Mary C. Morrison
 
Warm regards,
Karen
 
 
 
 
Karen Sella
www.luminacoaching.com <http://www.luminacoaching.com/> 
206.780.2998
 
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of
Harrison Owen
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 5:14 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Self and Meta-Self / Individual and Community
 
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
 
 
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