Card Sessions: Tracing Lines
One hundred year lifespan
Our minds turned Tiffany-twisted, we got Mercedes bent.
In a network, up ahead in the distance, a gentle glow.
If you look behind you, sure, there’s tracks. Up ahead in the distance, no path, only a gentle glow that illumines. Before you — no tracks, off the beaten path, only your trust, your movement making it so. Your head growing weary, a good sign.
Card: Sauntering
Make a point, enjoy the shared misery from defending them.
Make a tortuous line, force-fitting points with personal opinion.
Take lines for a walk, for a joint sauntering.
“x” = patterning
flow = structure x process
Patterning: 1938
“THE TASK of a University is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Patterning: 2021
The task of human civilization is the stewarding of possible futures, so far as understanding, taking thought, relational meaning-making and civilized modes of appreciating importance, can unfold, affect, guide and resolve, relevant to all the related issues.
Patterning: 2023
Any sufficiently advanced artifact is indistinguishable from a building block of modular, process-centric ontologies and social, networked epistemologies, designed in a context of 9E cognition and civilized modes of thought, in service to one trillion trees, one million villages and one thousand eco-cities, seven generations to come.
Patterning: 2025
300k smartphones equipped with a Transition Pathways app, online community and platform turned wise playground.
A Theory of Conscious Participation In Nature
“Through the contemplation of an ever creating nature, we should make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in her productions.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Her productions are always and already nature, life and signs are co-extensive and our transactions a dance, between our essential nature and evolutionary purpose.
“Goethe, on the other hand, saw the knowledge of a phenomenon as being intimately related to the phenomenon itself, because for him the state of “being known” was to be understood as a further stage of the phenomenon itself. It is the stage which the phenomenon reaches in human consciousness. Consequently the knower is not an onlooker but a participant in nature’s processes, which now act in consciousness to produce the phenomenon consciously as they act externally to produce it materially.”
— Henri Bortoft
Consciousness
We are waiting to come alive. We are spending almost every waking moment, resisting coming alive.
Social media makes us believe we are looking at things, while we in reality are occupied by consuming the surface of things.
Social Social Media: Glare turned Gentle Glow
The tracing of time is inseparable from our perception and our appreciation of space, color and time, inseparable from our learning into open and clear observation.
“Time’ has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red,to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to.. .It is impossible to take it all-in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”
— August Macke
This creative tension is our individual consciousness. Our unique shard of human awareness. Our separation, our wholeness.
You can check out any time you like
Phenomenon
“There must be depth since there is a point
whence I see — since the world surrounds me.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What things could you happen, what mixing boards could you gather around, what mixtapes could you produce and share, what new becomings would you be able to see, what ongoing questions and lines of inquiry could you see through? This happening, would it include a rekindling of a lived body, living seamlessly related to a living world?
“The great achievement of Merleau-Ponty’s major completed work, The Phenomenology of Perception, was to show that the fluid creativity we commonly associate with the human intellect is an elaboration or recapitulation of a deep creativity already underway at the most immediate level of bodily perception. Phenomenological philosophy had, since its inception, aimed at a rigorous description of things as they appear to an experiencing consciousness. Yet the body had remained curiously external to this “transcendental” consciousness. Merleau-Ponty was the first phenomenologist to identify the body, itself, as the conscious subject of experience. Transcendence, no longer a special property of the abstract intellect, becomes in his Phenomenology a capacity of the physiological body itself — its power of responding to other bodies, of touching, hearing, and seeing things, resonating with things. Perception is this ongoing transcendence, the ecstatic nature of the living body.”
— David Abram
A Theory Of Magic
Story. Story is how we embody purpose. With your every word, you are casting a spell, re-discovering and reinforcing wholeness of purposeful, magical becoming and/or re-enacting old, solipsist, increasingly obsolete beliefs. All of this, always and already, a sacred placemaking, an immanent place.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
Rhythm Of Becoming
In the very rhythm of your voice, there remains a more natural intelligence, an aliveness that is always and already animating yourself and the ecosystemic niche you are calling home. Speak, friend, walk here, and enter the portal to your own unique becoming yourself.
“We will later explore at length specific instances of this affinity between language and the animate landscape as it is embodied not only in myths and magical practices but in the everyday discourse of several contemporary indigenous tribes.
Here it is enough to mention that Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as a thoroughly incarnate medium, of speech as rhythm and expressive gesture, and hence of spoken words and phrases as active sensuous presences afoot in the material landscape (rather than as ideal forms that represent, but are not a part of, the sensuous world) — goes a long way toward helping us understand the primacy of language and word magic in native rituals of transformation, metamorphosis, and healing.
Only if words are felt, bodily presences, like echoes or waterfalls, can we understand the power of spoken language to influence, alter, and transform the perceptual world.”
— David Abram
A gentle glow, a golden thread
Glimpses of a golden thread,
as it weaves its way, emerging,
unfolding and evolving with
our behavior turned agency,
attention turned situational
awareness, will turned flow
and intelligence turned
(response)ability.
Our spell, turning real the moment it transacts
Our becoming ourselves in a world — part, parcel, parsing and participatory inquiry of our own making — is an infinite game. Our magic is all about how we witness, re-orient, listen forth, call forth and reciprocate.
she showed me the way
Mastery
Mastery is an intensely alive reciprocation with reality. The nature of reality is transactional and our spell, turning real the moment it transacts and we with.
“In a network, our working convivial magic includes a transmission of knowledge co-evolving with presence, intention, perspectives, languages, tools, practices and place and choosing a happy descending and returning in order to embrace what we receive in kind.”
@johnkellden
People engage in magic, in spells, through voice, in conversations, spoken and written, all the time. Metalogues, meaning-making-moving-with, as we turn our attention into situational awareness.
Situational Awareness
“The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.”
― Paul Klee
There’s a natural rhythm to our magic, to our conversations, to how our metalogue makes magic, conjuring formative powers.
We are all just prisoners here, of our own device
Magic co-evolves. Magic arises, rhymes and revolves around nature — and we become increasingly our own unique selves, out of never ever being fully separate, neither from nature, nor from ourselves, from our innate nature.
Mastery
Catalyzing, unfolding and cultivating luminous paths. Weaving our paths with chreods, with transition pathways. Mastery as whole-making, guiding all other disciplines, informing our architectures in all domains.
Card Sessions: Configuration Spaces
Card: Spheroid Spiral
What questions, cards, considerations, annotations and co-creation of value, spiraling through autopoiesis (virtue) and anticipatory systems (path); preferable outcomes made by joint sauntering?
Reframing Things: Architecture as Whole-Making
Card: Chreod
“The word “chreod” also closely describes paths of decision within what Christopher Alexander has called, configuration space, his term for what he notes that Stuart Kaufmann calls “fitness landscape.”[2] Configuration space is a conceptual landscape which contains all possible outcomes and points of decision within the design of a structure or the growth of an organism or system.
Because so very few of the possible outcomes will be good ones, paths to the infinitesimally rare possible and good solutions must be followed to get good results. These paths or, “chreods” appear to be followed automatically in the biological world. (see the cited Kwinter excerpt)
By Alexander’s theory, because conscious human design decisions do not need to follow these chreods, conscious human design can lead to mixed results. Therefore, he proposes that discovering ways to allow architecture to follow these paths is the best way to get good results in the built environment.
Alexander sees his theories of “The Fundamental Process,” “structure preserving transformations” and “15 fundamental properties” which he outlines in his four volume work, The Nature of Order as instrumentally shaping paths through configuration space.”
Magic of Presence, Magic of Place
You bring yourself, your presence to every situation, to every place you go.
Such a lovely place
Each situation, each place affects you in return, works its magic, affects your presence. You coming increasingly alive, is the whole point of life.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget
A Theory Of Spirituality
If we believe our senses inferior and posit spirituality as something extra-sensory, something non-dual, something beyond, we simply re-introduce and/or form attachments to the journey metaphor, which implies we are not fully here, here. We are. Always and already.
Spirituality
To enhance and/or alchemically anneal the spontaneous life of the senses.
Not that this needs to devolve into an oversimplification that our physical bodies, our senses is all there is. That was the devils mistake, falling, and becoming angry with himself when hitting ground.
They stab it with their steely knives
No, that is making the same mistake of a journey, from spirit, “down” to body. The suffering, a function of how angry we believe we need to be based on the bruises we believe we acquired in the fall.
No, no test
No test, no trials nor tribulations on our journey, but our thoughts made it so.
Or, rather, the journey being one of the many lenses, metaphors through which we can choose to rediscover life, spirit, here-ness and now-ness in the here and now.
A Theory Of Superpowers
Perhaps a bit counterintuitively, Patanjali to the rescue, the part where he outlines the superpowers, the siddhis. Modifications of the mind, bends.
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
The siddhis, a roped path, forming part of your own pathless path, back to your here and now. Only, there is no path. You can never leave.
“Wanderer, there is no path, the path is made by walking.”
— Antonio Machado
A Theory Of Mixtapes
Lines of inquiry, dissonant and resonant lines, lines that wake you up in the middle of the night. Lines you return to. Lines of beauty, golden threads.
Off the beaten highway, desert seeds heralding rain.
At a nearby pond, magic. Form. Life. For a brief spell, a glimpse.
