This is my thought for the day!

 

I think that if we reversed our habitual way of perceiving – which ‘sees’ separation onto the world, and instead tried to fully understand our ideas of ‘difference’ and ‘unity’ in the context of how they emerge organically within Nature, that we could be on our way to developing a more ‘inclusive’ way of seeing.

 

By developing this way of seeing, and understanding, we create the potential to start healing our actions of inhumane discrimination, and to grow the capacity within us to love and appreciate diversity. We begin to see mulitplicity in unity.

 

 To illustrate my ideas here is a quote from “Taking Appearance seriously”, Henri Bortoft pg 57, “Goethe’s way proceeds by active looking and exact sensorial imagination…..We visualise the first leaf, and then move in imagination to the next leaf, and so on. We begin to have the intuition that we are seeing ‘one’ leaf manifesting in different forms. We have the sense that this ‘one’ leaf is intrinsically dynamic, and that this dynamic whole is a movement of differencing which produces ‘multiplicity in unity’. The verbal-intellectual mind, in contrast, focuses on the sameness of the different leaves, and from this abstracts the notion of ‘one’ leaf as simply what all the leaves have in common – their lowest common denominator. All differences are excluded from this ‘one’, whereas for the sensuous-intuitive mode of perception the differences are within the ‘one’. Instead of abstracting unity from diversity, we have the intuition that the diversity is within unity……There is a reversal of perception here that it is hard to convey unless experienced – it’s as if our perception of unity and diversity is turned inside out, so that diversity is seen ‘within’ unity instead of unity being abstracted ‘from’ diversity.”

 

For more info or ideas on how to practically develop this with groups or individuals, email me at emmakidd81@gmail.com