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The Democratisation of Knowledge – Part 2: Collectively Enlivening what and how we know

Part 2 – The Democratisation of Knowledge:

Collectively Enlivening what and how we know

“To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Continued from Part One: To allow the participants at the ASHA Centre to experience how, or what, it means to them to give the phenomenon of their inquiry their ‘cognitive space’ to become other, and to be seen in process I led them through a phenomenological (or Goethean) study of a Willow tree.

Phenomenology is primarily concerned with how human beings experience the world, and also how we can learn to get to know aspects of the world ‘in terms of themselves’ through our experiencing it, by participating with it in an open, receptive, yet critical way; so as not to constrict or narrow our understanding of the world by squeezing it into our pre-formed (already existing) “rational” assumptions, labels, concepts, or objectifications. It is about being present to ‘what is’, ‘as it is’ – in one’s experiencing of it. Through careful, exact, direct observation, description, and qualitative interpretation, you try to allow the phenomenon to ‘speak for itself’, so that your understanding of it, can be as authentic, and true to the actual phenomenon as possible.

This type of understanding/knowledge is called inter-subjectivity. It transcends the dualism of objectivity (thinking that you are completely separate from something – which is only a rational/intellectual illusion) and subjectivity (thinking that the ‘truth’ of your experience only belongs individually to you, and reduces your experience to just being an ‘interpretation – also an illusion). It confronts, and honours, the paradox of what it means to be human; that we have individual autonomy and free will, yet are also inextricably intertwined with everything that we experience.

Phenomenology takes into account different dynamics of life than are commonly considered in other research methodologies, such as; the whole expressing itself through its part, intrinsic value expressing itself through extrinsic form, the inherent interconnectedness of all life, social and physical; and it includes all facets of human experience and knowing within its process of inquiry. For example how we ‘feel’ when engaging with a phenomenon, becomes just as important as how ‘see’ it. Unlike other forms of research, they do not need to be set aside to allow precedence to what we ‘think’ about ‘it’. We also make space for our intuition and imagination, not for fantasy, but to be used as tools for thinking. Phenomenology is not a theory, or a model – it is a disciplined approach to a certain way of being human, a way that gives voice to the world as we fully experience it, in our particular, unique existence. Intellectualisation, generalisation and objectification are consciously set to one side.

The ‘living context’ (network of relationships) of a phenomenon is just as relevant to the inquiry as the direct experience of the phenomenon itself, as phenomenology recognises that there are no absolute separations between anything, and so understanding the living context of the phenomenon in relation to the phenomenon itself allows us to build a much richer, more alive understanding. Studying the living context, the ‘ground’, as well as the phenomenon, the ‘figure’, gives the research much more grounding, more depth, and more accuracy as a whole, than if you were to only study the phenomenon in isolation from all that it interacts with, and is surrounded by.

Phenomenology also acknowledges the ‘naiveté of everyday experience’ (Husserl), which means that some of the most important and relevant information that we need is right under our noses, but that we often skip straight past it in everyday life due to how we learn to perceive and interact with our life-world and our thought-world.

So, back to the Willow tree!

I led the participants into an individual process of observing parts of the tree through ‘exact sense perception’, allowing their eyes to feel their way around a small part of the tree that caught their interest, noticing the details of shape, form, texture, colour that are exactly there in front of them. This is a process of noticing and being present to something exactly as it is, rather than relying on what you think you already know about it. By using our eyes more like fingers, to feel our way around the form in front of us, we suspend our capacity to constrict the world through generalised labelling and judgement, and what opens up is the possibility to see the immense and infinite complexity and diversity of detail that is immediately in front of us. This ‘revelation’ is often the source of much awe and wonder bursting forth from the participants. What starts out as 10cm square section of tree bark suddenly becomes seen a whole universe within itself.

Exact sense perception can provide quite a challenge to some as it requires a quality of attention and focus that many are not used to using in their everyday lives. We largely live and navigate our way through the world by using what we think we already know about it as a reference point. So, to set this aside can feel a little uncomfortable to start with, but with perserverance…even just 30 seconds concentrated effort, we can manage to bypass the fast-paced intellect, and actually start attending to what is directly before us, engaged in a process which most of the participants find relaxing, calming, absorbing and flow like.

The next part of the process we entered into was trying to describe our experience of the tree, as exactly as possible. In Husserlian phenomenology this is called the Reduction. We try to set aside, to bracket, what we think about the phenomenon, our judgements and explanations, and instead to try allow the phenomenon to come into being as exactly and concretely as possible through our descriptions. This can also be quite a challenge, as the tendency is again to use what think we already know about it, as a reference point for what we have experienced. So, what we learnt at school about photosynthesis or some other biological plant processes may try to creep into our descriptions, rather than noting what we saw directly in front of us. I asked the participants to describe the part of the tree they observed as if it was to someone who had never seen it before, as this can help to bring their attention back to what they directly experienced.

After our study of the Willow tree and a phenomenon of choice within the gardens at ASHA, we had some group reflection on the process and some beautiful insights emerged in relation to what I call the ‘democratisation of knowledge’. We experienced collectively that by engaging directly with the phenomenon of your inquiry, a much more grounded, empowering sense of knowing emerges – one that is simultaneously aware of the first-person, concrete, lived depth of your own experience, as well as the limits of your own knowing through understanding exactly how much time you have spent with the phenomenon, and gaining a sense of how much more there is still left ‘to know’, or more to the point, to experience.

To the individual, the quality of knowing that is come to through direct lived experience of something, and challenging your knowing beyond what you think you already know, is vastly different than how it feels to just be given second-hand ‘information’ about something. Then, to engage in this process of ‘getting to know the world in terms of itself’ collectively, individuals realise that there is validity inherent in their lived experience of the world, that they have something worth saying, and that if patterns keep emerging within the group that reinforce their individual experience, then this consensus equals a knowing, a knowledge about something that is just as valid as the ‘information’ that have been given about something, if not more so, because they themselves have experienced it.

What arose from the participants during our session, was that through participating directly and engaging with the unique life of something, we overcome the illusory subject/object divide that our rational mind creates for us, and by coming together to compare our individual experiences, we create a space for consensus to emerge. This creates the possibility for the non-‘expert’ to build more solid, democratic, empowering foundation for knowledge to arise, both individually and collectively.

I feel that the societal implications are such that if at least some of our collective ‘knowledge’ was constructed in this way, we would not be so locked in to class and money oriented cul-de-sacs. Knowing through direct experience and allowing patterns of experiences to emerge from diverse, particular instances, to form ‘consensus’, gives us the chance to come together within our diversity; to be aware that we have the possibility to know the world in fundamentally different ways yet still arise at a shared language of the world. A living experiential inquiry of the world favours the word or thoughts of no man or woman over and above any other, giving everyone an equal voice in our collective efforts of getting to know the world in terms of itself.

This democratic process of knowing, and phenomenology, requires a personal discipline in terms of how we attend to and describe our experience of the world and, to fully understand why we need this discipline, a personal, experiential exploration of how and where our cognitive and perceptive tendencies lead us – but imagine that this is what our ‘educational’ system is based on; an understanding and exploration of what it is to be human, alongside a guided process of allowing the world to come into expression through us, but in terms of itself through our direct experience and participation with it; focusing not on ‘what’ we know, but ‘how’ we know, and letting the knowing unfold from there….that would be my kind of school, based on lived experience, naturally and inherently democratic, empowering both the individual and the collective….a “School of life ‘as it is'”.

If you would like to explore together what a School of Life ‘as it is’ would look like, feel like, be like in practice, feel free to email me! emmakidd81@gmail.com

(This workshop was held twice, with my great pleasure, at the ASHA Centre, for twenty-something youth workers, youth leaders, students and volunteers working in the field of Sustainable Development.

The programme, which started in October 2012, has enabled 196 participants from across the UK to take part in a five-day programme devoted to Sustainable Development education and was funded by the EU’s Youth in Action programme.

The ASHA Centre is a UK charity working for the empowerment of young people, sustainable development and peace & reconciliation worldwide. www.ashacentre.org )

Part 1 – The Democratisation of Knowledge

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Part 1 – The Democratisation of Knowledge:

Collectively Enlivening what and how we know

I had the pleasure to teach a morning session at The ASHA Centre in Gloucestershire last week, as part of a 5 day residential on “Youth in Action for Sustainable Development”. My brief was to introduce the participants to alternative way of knowing the world through using the example of Goethe’s Scientific inquiries. However, as I am re-discovering again and again in my practice of Phenomenology, if we just look at what Goethe did in his scientific explorations of the natural world, such as studies on colour, light, and plants, we are very much missing the dynamic that sets his work so far apart from mechanistic investigations of the same phenomena. What is truly important in his work is not what he did, but how he did it. His studies are the finished product of a certain way of seeing and being with the world that he managed to cultivate within himself and call forth during his investigation – it was a dynamic way of seeing.

I am aware that speaking of ‘ways of seeing’ can seem rather abstract to the listener, so I combined some perceptual exercises with the ideas from Iain McGilchrist’s work on the bi-modal brain, as a framework for interpretation. Through a drawing exercise and some visual exercises I tried to lead the group into a direct living experience of shifts in their cognition and perception. So, together we were able to experience how we respond differently to things in life that we ‘think’ we know, and those that we are knowing for the first time. We were also able to experience how difficult it can be to move beyond the idea of what we ‘think’ we know, and that this can very much get in the way of us being able to presently engage with what is directly in front of us, in its uniqueness and particularity, without constriction or reduction.

We did this by using the Face/Vase drawing exercise that I was introduced to at Art School 14 years ago. The exercise came from the book “Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. I first asked the students to draw a side profile of a face, using a quick, simple line drawing. Whilst drawing this, I asked the participants to carefully pay attention there experience whilst drawing.

Together we experienced how smoothly, and relatively quickly we could manage this. We all ‘knew’ what a face looked like, so it was a quick and easy task. The lines that were used to draw were mostly smooth, bold, solid and certain. Next, we drew two parallel lines at the top and bottom of the ‘face’ profile, and drew a mirror image of the face at the end of the parallel lines.

Photo credit: www.todayicreated.com

The experience of the second drawing task felt to us all very different in comparison to the first. The quality of the lines used also looked quite different. As an experience, it was a much more tentative, delicate journey, and we really felt the shift in attention and processing that was required to do it. We realised together that you have to be much more present to newness and uniqueness that is immediately before you. You can no longer copy an idea of something that you already ‘know’, you must instead relate to what is directly in front of you. You must also attend to its context, carefully comparing spatial proportions, as well as the particularities of, and relationships between the space and shapes. The overall of the second face felt quite of the opposite of the first – and I feel it is a great way of concretely exploring the experience of how we attend to the world in two very different ways, depending on whether we already think we know it, or not.

In terms of the work of Iain McGilchrist, you could say that this is a demonstration of how we experience the world using the two different brain hemispheres. The sure, certain, quick, smooth experience being the left hemisphere, and the more present, delicate, context focused, tentative approach being the right hemisphere.

To further explore our lived experience of cognition and perception I showed the picture of the Giraffe to the group, which was created by Henri Bortoft’s wife Jackie to illustrate Henri’s concept of the ‘organising idea’.

I used this picture to illustrate what McGilchrist calls the ‘sticky’ nature of the left-hemisphere, and the difficulties it presents us with moving beyond the organising idea of something, our mind’s re-presentation of it, and further upstream to the presencing of what is directly in front of us, in its uniqueness. Once you have seen the Giraffe it is almost, if not completely, impossible not to see it! We found as a group that ourselves, as the inquirer, had to dramatically alter our perspective when looking at the picture if we were to see it as anything other than the Giraffe; either by turning the picture sideways, or by going much closer up to it. Only then could we focus on the particular details and relationships that made up the whole picture, beyond what our minds kept trying to organise it into.

We also looked at some well-known pictures of what are commonly known as ‘optical illusions’ – the Duck/Rabbit, and the Young/Old lady. The term ‘illusion’ is only really relevant, and presents a paradox, to our rational mind however, as to our experience there is no ‘illusion’ as we see both, just not at the same time. Together we experienced just this, it was never possible to see both organising ideas at once. We observed a kind of ‘flicking’ sensation in our experience, as our perception quickly switched from one image/idea to the other. For me, this is a great experience of how stuck we can become in our knowing and perceiving the world, as one way of seeing something can literally block out the potential for it to be appear in any other way.

And so, you, and the students, may have been wondering how this is all related to Goethe’s scientific inquiries? Well, for Goethe to have produced such comprehensive, relational, dynamic accounts of the life, livingness and process of the things he studied, he must have been able to go beyond what he already thought he knew about things, beyond his organising ideas, to see them relationally, delicately, in context – so that he could attend, in the present moment, to what was directly observable in his lived experience. He offered the thing he was studying his ‘cognitive space’ so to speak, becoming a vessel for receiving the exactness of a thing, rather than projecting his own ideas onto it, and then using instruments and apparatus to prove them. He would have had to allow the thing the space to become other, to be in process, dynamic and in flow, to be a be-ing not just a has been. Goethe managed to cultivate a dynamic way of seeing, beyond the limitations of his rational mind. The result was a series of scientific investigations, rigorous studies of natural phenomena, but carried out with the converse yet complementary capacities of a Poet’s artistic mind.

What the Frack?!?

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Photo credit: globaldashboard.org

What the Frack?!? How can we evolve humanity beyond our culture of violence, self-centeredness and domination into one of peace, partnership and creativity?

“The Sky is Pink!” by Josh Fox and the Gasland team

Fracking has been on the periphery of my awareness for a while now, but it wasn’t until I met with friends at the weekend, and had the process, and the dangers explained to me that my outrage began. I have since done some of my own research and came across the video that I have posted above. I found it gave me a more in depth yet concise account of what fracking is, how it is obviously very harmful to people and the environment – including infiltrating our drinking water through the invading the earths’ water tables with potentially carcinogenic chemicals, and not to mention destroying acres of natural habitats and farmland.

The video also reveals that the same PR company who were hired for a dis-information campaign by tobacco companies in the 1950’s to dispel the rumour that smoking causes cancer, and to promote cigarettes as ‘good for you’ , have been hired by the American Natural Gas Association to promote fracking, like smoking tobacco in the 1950’s, as perfectly harmless. Watch the video, do some research and you make up your own mind.

My question is how can any individual in a position of great collective responsibility advocate for a process that is so incredibly destructive, both for human and non-human life? Especially in the face of so much scientific, geological and medical evidence, not to mention pleas from everyday people not to deface their nation’s land, or to compromise their drinking water? What could be the possible dynamics of their being and experience that motivate their actions?

Well, to me the possibility for that kind of denial suggests a closed mind, most certainly a closed heart, a strong self-interest above and beyond everything and everyone else, and probably deep down, fear. Their minds are closed to scientific evidence, their hearts are closed to emotional pleas from citizens, they are interested only in maintaining the source of their personal wealth, and they are probably living in fear of losing their wealth, power and control. In terms of how they are experiencing and reacting to the world, they have closed themselves to life, shutdown, restricting themselves to a mere fraction of their possibility ‘to be’ human.

When I understand that those few, so far removed from my everyday experience of life, who make decisions for the many, that affect my possibilities in everyday life to experience clean drinking water or enjoy my country’s natural habitat, are functioning in this way, as a mere shadow of humanity, I end up feeling rather dis-empowered. So how can I practically effect lasting change within my personal remit, other than spreading information to raise awareness of the issues?

Well, I can challenge myself to change, and to live a life that is a polar opposite to the greed, and narrow minded self-interest of a closed, fearful person. I challenge myself to live life fully awake and alive, to practice being and becoming the fullest, liveliest possibility of what it means to me, to be human. To have courage to come alive and to appear in my fullness, to lead the way, by example, in being human – to be open; receptive; welcoming; participatory; sensitive to the dynamics and context of all facets of life; and mindful that each and every move I make is from love and gratitude, not from fear and control.

I can choose to be aware, moment by moment, of my living context and the context of all my actions and decisions. I can choose not to be deceived by appearances, the ‘thing’ before me, but to go further and to participate in exploring its process, its life. I can begin to understand that there is a ripple of consequences that follow all of my actions.

I can wake up to the fact that I have a cognitive capacity to ‘see’ the world in different ways, re-presenting through my left hemisphere, or presencing through my right hemisphere (see my article ‘The Art of Seeing’ referencing the work of Iain McGilchrist), and that making a conscious choice in how I see the world affects what I see. I must understand, when exploring the dynamics of life, that diversity is an expression of unity, not of separation. It is only the cognitive process of the left hemisphere that separates. I must remind myself that the dynamics ARE the life of a ‘thing’, not the ‘thing’ itself. The product of thought, word, or creation, is just a snapshot of its history of being, just an illusion of solidity fixed in space and time. I need to employ my imagination and intuition to see and to understand the process beyond that ‘snapshot’ which presents itself to our immediate senses.

I need to understand that absolute separation is only an illusion, stemming from our way of attending to the world. I need to understand that the life, the living essence, and intrinsic value of anything will never be fully present before me in a fixed, object form, and that only through understanding its dynamics will the life of that thing be able to appear before me, and to live within me.

I must take care to attend to the world with care and with focus to what is directly available to me in my living experience through engaging and participating in a relationship with it, so that I am not just attending to the thing through my judgements, preconceptions, assumptions, fixed ideas and concepts. I have to learn to let go, to be vulnerable and to accept the unknown, if I am ever to stand a chance of truly and deeply getting to know anything, or to fully and confidently stand in my own knowing, rather than always deferring to the thoughts or words of another.

I have to meet the world in my nakedness, and to see the world with naked eyes, removing the filters and veils that we layer ourselves up with to maintain control and to keep fear at bay. Only then am I in a position to get to know anything in life in terms of itself, and to participate in a healthy, living relationship that in turn may allow life to live and thrive, within and between us.

I cannot personally change the closed minded, closed hearted people in responsibility at the top of our collective systems who are protecting their self-interest, motivated by fear and control, limiting themselves to being only a shadow of a human – but I can open myself and relate to them, if I ever get to meet them, and to those who are around me in an open and receptive way. I can attend to context and process, participating with and accepting all I meet with an unconditional positive regard, or, you could call it, love.

I can use my imagination and intuition to work out how I can affect positive change in the systems and actions of which I am immediately and experientially a part of, such as, where I buy my food from; how I use the energy that the fracking is destined by some to produce; and what and how much I buy from the dazzling, ubiquitous array of energy intensive, mass-produced consumer goods that are on offer to us in the western world.

I can become adept at exploring the living context and dynamic processes of all my actions, seeing how and what they are in relationship with the rest of the world and its systems, and thus act accordingly. I can continue to become more curious, getting to know the world in terms of itself, and acting from a deeper, more awake and aware, receptive space – that is a response to life as it is, rather than reacting to the static abstraction of what I, or others, think or tell me it is.

I can also direct this inquiry inwards, which is of equal importance. I can curiously explore with wonder my own being, and what my personal needs are that need meeting for me to thrive, beyond those that society, the government and international bodies tell me they are, and that usually amount to no more than survival and subsistence. I can learn to explore, to experience and to identify what my physical needs are, such as food, shelter, warmth, and also what my non-physical needs are, such as love, affection, sense of belonging. (See the work of the Chilean economist Max Manfred-Neef for the most comprehensive, contemporary view on this).

Once I have identified my own, authentic needs as I experience them in my everyday life, I can then mindfully work to meet them, with regard to the process and context of how I do so, so that I can thrive and, in combination with all that I have suggested above, be a living example of what is possible in the quest to becoming fully human. I can live by example so that others can witness and experience the benefits that it could bring them, so that they may understand that they can also become more of who they are by becoming something other than they already are.

And so, my hope is that the seeds of life may germinate, one by one, until eventually the ripple of open-minded, receptive, welcoming, unconditional positive regard may eventually reach across the counties and the oceans, to the shores of those pinnacles of self-interest – and that on meeting this way of being human, it may strike a chord somewhere deep within them, or spark a deep recognition of intuitive understanding that I believe they too hold somewhere inside of them, and that one day, that seed may start to germinate and come into being within them also.

This is not a prescription or a doctrine for how to be human. It is just a personal exploration of the capacities that human beings hold, that enable them, that enable me, to be human. So from my own lived experience, and from observing human and non-human life, I do believe that by developing a more dynamic way of seeing, being, and living, personally – and professionally through creating new living systems based on context, process and relationship – we will spread the potential of becoming more fully human through cultural transmission, by seeing and living more dynamically.

Just as the overly analytical, static, closed way of seeing of the Western world, with its over emphasis on quantification, mechanisation, reductionism and control, has been culturally transmitted to nearly the rest of the entire world ; so, in turn, can we spread the love, the dynamics of life, that are openness and receptivity, with an unconditional positive regard for all, an evolution in being, that sees beyond just the ‘things themselves’, to understand their life processes, and the interconnected web of relationships that is their living context – and so spread the potential for each and every human to feel and to be, to become more fully alive by doing so. Evolving humanity beyond our culture of violence, self-centeredness and domination into one of peace, partnership and creativity.

The Art of Seeing – An Evolution of Being

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“And yet, I know artists whose medium is Life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life. They SEE and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.”The Zen of Seeing, by Frederick Frank

There is more to seeing than meets the eye, and there is more to being than just living. What I have discovered through my journey of practicing phenomenology and a dynamic way of seeing, is that when we explore beyond our habitual ways of seeing and being, and start to re-engage with our direct living experience of the world, we can begin to understand how we and the world are both more alive, more dynamic, and profoundly more meaning-full than we could have ever previously imagined, and thus can begin to participate in the dance of life accordingly. However, as I try to reveal to my students when doing phenomenological studies of Nature, is that seeing and knowing life in terms of itself, requires a refinement in our capacities to see and to know life, which I believe involves a fundamental evolution in being human. I will endeavor to describe this evolution for you below.

Possibly the greatest learning that has been revealed to me over the past 5 years of my young life (I am now 32), is that there is more to seeing than meets the eye, as what lies further upstream from ‘what’ we see in the world, is the cognitive process of ‘how’ we see the world. For me, and I think for humanity in general, this is huge. This means that there is also more to knowing than what we think we know about something, and these both then obviously have an effect on how we are be-ing in the world. This ‘missed dimension of cognition in perception’, or how we see, has been explored extensively in my former teacher’s study of a dynamic way of seeing, Henri Bortoft, in “Taking Appearance Seriously”. As well as in Iain McGilchrist’s masterpiece exploring the left and right hemispheres of the brain, “The Master and his Emissary”. Both of which have been pivotal in my work of practicing a phenomenology of perception, and of getting to know life in terms of itself, and I would like to explore this ‘missed dimension’ with you first.

One way of seeing that is available to us, and according to McGilchrist is associated with the left-hemisphere of the brain, re-presents the world for us into organising ideas, concepts, symbols and abstractions, creating universal distinctions and separation between things. This allows us to analyze and create maps of our experience of the world, very useful for our physical and intellectual navigation and communication of it. It focuses quite specifically on content and solid physicality, and occurs in all mammals. Think of a bird surveying a detailed patch of ground for a worm, it does this with it’s right eye, which coordinates to it’s left brain hemisphere. At the same time it needs to survey the territory, the living context, for predators, and it does this with its left eye/right brain. Bortoft describes this content specific, left hemisphere way of seeing as following the logic of solid bodies; it can name, label, analyze, quantify and focus on the separation every thing that is physically ‘there’ before us. It creates a generalized picture of our experience of the thing, which Bortoft calls the organising idea. We can then conveniently use the ‘idea’ of the thing when we need to refer to, or look for something at speed and to communicate to others that we know something about this thing in the world. It can enable us to bridge the chasm between my physical experience of the world and yours, both of which we will never experience directly for ourselves, but with generalized symbols, names and labels, we can communicate in a way that tries to reach a shared understanding, enough at least for us to physically get by together in the world. I call this way of seeing in-organic, as it’s qualities are static, fixed and absolute, it contains no life.

However, before the in-organic generalizations that this one way of knowing, the left-hemisphere of the brain, conveniently organizes for us; there is our experience of the dynamic, living world, the territory as it is, appearing in terms of itself – organically, in its living-ness. This is the world that appears to us when we employ our other way of knowing, using the right-hemisphere of the brain, which has the effect of presencing the world we experience, on its own terms. This organic, dynamic way of seeing allows the phenomenon you wish to understand to be a being, and allows you to engage with it as a becoming; dynamic, alive and continually in process. This type of encounter is participatory rather than controlling; in relation with rather than separate from; enlivening rather than constricting; and allows the implicit essence, or meaning, to emerge rather than being blinded by only what is explicit, its physicality. As this way of seeing occurs prior to the separating, organizing mode of the left-hemisphere, the right-hemisphere is concerned with context and ambiguity. It focuses on the unique and the particular instances of what you are seeing, and the relationships to all that surround them.

McGilchrist suggests that we have evolved into a pattern of cognition which allows the left-hemisphere to dominate our everyday experiences of life. And so due to it’s inorganic nature, we are then left with an inability to recognize life in its livingness, and in instead separate it from its living context and reduce it to the physical sum of its parts. This has been very clearly manifested in the human systems that we have created from the scientific revolution onwards; industrialization, capitalism, national centralizations of resources and power. I think that we are all experiencing the limitations that this in-organic way of seeing inherently contains, whether it be through the credit-crisis, being witness to climate chaos, frustration at continued privatization of national services, youth unemployment or the mechanistic nature of a healthcare system focused solely on pharmaceuticals and quick ‘mechanical’ fixes.

I do not want to raise one way of seeing above another. Our capacity of re-presenting the world is just as integral to our ability to thrive, as our capacity of presencing the world is, but what we do need to recognize collectively is that an evolutionary over-emphasis on the left-hemisphere has led us into a hall of mirrors that is literally squeezing the life out of us. Next we need to realize that we can escape it, and we can do it without losing all of the wonders that this over-emphasis on the in-organic nature of knowing has allowed to come into being, such as the technology for the internet, and the engineering of mass-transportation; without losing focus on the importance of the individual, or forgetting the living context of the Earth from which all life springs, including the individual. It just means waking up to limitations of our dominant way of seeing, and mode of cognition, and making a practical effort to readdress the balance, such as I try to do in my workshops. The path to evolving our way of seeing and being does not mean that we revert back to a pool of gooey oneness where there is no distinction between the one and the many, but neither is the current way of seeing ourselves and the world numerically as many ‘ones’, all separate from and independent of one another and their surroundings, leading us anywhere apart from a fast-track to mass-extinction.

I feel the evolutionary dance move that we now need to aim for is, in the words of my wonderful teacher Brain Goodwin, one of “Maximum freedom to the parts, maximum coherence to the whole.” A way of seeing and of being that gives equal attention to content and context, to the implicit and explicit, to individual expression and collective cohesion. It calls for what Bortoft has described as a ‘dynamic way of seeing’, and I believe that it re-addresses the balance between our use of the left and the right hemisphere. Rather than L, L, L,….ad infinitum which, generally speaking, is where we are collectively right now. Without a doubt it is certainly where we are in mainstream education and in politics. McGilchrist suggests that we need a movement towards a cognitive pattern of R,L,R. Context, content, context. This way of seeing meets the world in terms of itself, allows the appearance of generalized pattern to occur, but then has the ability to let them go, and return to a stance of open receptivity, to meet the thing we think we know again and again with fresh new eyes. Or as in the words of the 20^th century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when we learn to let go and meet the world in its living context we return, “To stand in wonder before it.”. In this way we allow life not only to be, but to become, and in this process we are ourselves are becomed by life, we allow life to live within and without us. The gesture of this way of seeing, and way of being, is actively welcoming and receptive, and its essential nature is openness. We refine and expand our capacity to become more fully human by becoming receptive and welcoming – and it is an actively receptive stance that is a step beyond imposed activity or mere passivity. The nature of this way of seeing is openness; it is welcoming and allows things to be exactly as they are, with no need to fix or to change them. To me, this actively receptive openness feels like it stems just as much from my heart as it does from my mind. It require us to see with fresh new eyes and to proceed with child-like wonder, as if meeting something for the first time, every time we meet it. In this way we are open to perpetually allow the phenomenon we perceive to become more than just the sum of our past experience of it, and more than just the inorganic abstractions of the left-hemisphere will allow us. And as a nod to the financial systems currently in crisis, this way of seeing and being focuses and invests not in accumulated credit based on an inorganic abstraction, but in life, the dynamics of an organic being and its living potential to become.

Emma Kidd , MSc SchumacherCollege – Practitioner and practical researcher of Phenomenology, editor of http://www.sensinglife.net and co-founder of the independent think-tank http://www.hologramcollective.com

Taking Appearance Seriously

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I have just finished reading Henri Bortoft’s latest, and unfortunately, last ever book, “Taking Appearance Seriously”, and when I got to the last chapter, I forgot that he had even included part of my work, until I found myself literally on… top of it, in the final paragraph of the final chapter, following a comparison with the work of Wittgenstein! Oh my goodness…I feel blessed, and very, very grateful. There’s a kick up the backside for my confidence, and a right hook for my self doubting mind if ever I needed it! Thank you Henri, so very much….

http://www.florisbooks.co.uk/book/Henri-Bortoft/Taking+Appearance+Seriously/9780863159275

Part Two of a guest article featured Transition Conciousness

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Guest Article: Emma Kidd – “A Pathway to Living Knowledge” Course review – Part Two

Part One of this article can be read here. In this second part Emma discusses in detail a phenomenological way of knowing plants. At the end of the article she provides guidance notes on this process.

A Pathway to Living Knowledge 2012 – Course Review – Part Two

The question is not what you look at — but how you look and whether you see. – Thoreau

As I mentioned at the end of Part One, during the week long course we did not study an abstract theory, methodology, nor were we overloaded with information. Instead we were led from day one on our own pathway to living knowledge, by using the practice of phenomenological inquiry from the outset to get to know the world in terms of itself through our direct, lived experience.

Photo credit: Emma Kidd

In the mornings we mostly worked with Craig on phenomenological plants studies, and in the afternoons with Henrike we did various forms of projective geometry, discovering the patterns of lawfulness that emerge from pure mathematics. From the very beginning Craig encouraged us to reverse our habitual approach to studying the world. To do something and then consider it, rather than to consider something in abstraction, and then do it. He described the phenomenological process as a shift of focus, a turning to something in the world where you enter the methodology through directly participating with the phenomenon, and this is what we did.

Over a series of sessions, both indoors and outdoors, we were encouraged to describe, as exactly as possible, the natural phenomena that we were introduced to such as the wildflower Golden Rod, which inhabited the surrounding sunlit meadows. During the process of describing our observations of the plants we were led to, gently but firmly, discern between descriptions that were true to our visual observations and that could be verified through consensus within the group, and to reject those that were projections, judgments or assumptions, and thus not true to phenomenon itself. The latter were held lightly and always put to one side so to be sure as possible that it was the phenomenon speaking to us, not us making things up on it’s behalf. In practicing a phenomenological inquiry the encounter with the phenomenon becomes a riddle, and being able to dwell in a space of ‘not knowing’ becomes vital. When we fix something with the idea that we ‘know’ it, we close a door it – a phenomenological inquiry keeps the door always open. During our observations and descriptions we were asked to consider the concept of what it even means ‘to know’ at all, and to develop the capacity within ourselves to remain open, whilst we allow ourselves to further deepen our relationship with the particular ‘riddle’ that we had chosen to engage with.

After practicing describing different natural phenomena such as the Golden Rod, we were then asked to reflect on our observations. What emerged was that all sense perceptions occur in the present moment, which means there are limits to what is possible when approaching a phenomenon in this way. When you get to the limits of your observations in the present moment, the impulse to experiments arises. To create more sense perceptions you may feel like you want to dissect the phenomenon, to refrain from being stuck in your own story, but then you end up breaking up the phenomenon rather than studying it as a whole. To get around this we used hand-held magnifying glasses to study a closer level of detail in our plants, but this was done with consideration and the knowledge that any apparatus we use is putting up a physical veil between the phenomenon and our direct sense perception. To gain an even broader, living picture we went to the various different places that the plants grew, such as the meadows, hedgerows and woodlands, and observed the differing physical contexts and how the plants manifested themselves the same but differently in different places and growing conditions. There was a huge contrast between how the plants manifested. In the sunny paddock, they were bursting full of tiny yellow flowers, just like a firework had been set off and then freeze framed. Where as in shaded woodland, only dappled with light, there was a much great degree of spacing between the flowers, the plants were smaller with fewer branches and the flowers organs even had a slightly different configuration.

Photo credit: Emma Kidd

After our direct sense observations we used a technique that is called, exact sensorial imagination (or inner re-picturing), to re-member in our minds the exact details of the plants that we had previously observed. This is a process of reliving your encounter with the phenomenon, but inside your mind, as concretely and intensely as possible. It is a process that helps your mind to develop a dynamic way of seeing. It helps you to get a sense of the living dynamics of the phenomenon – dynamics that are not available to our present moment sense perception. It is similar to creating the effect that you would get by documenting a plant’s growth with a time lapse camera, but building your own cognitive capacities in the process. It allows us to build up a rich, fluid, internal picture and helps us to notice what we need to pay more attention to when we next return to the phenomenon.

During the week it became obvious that mystery is an important part of this process. There is an interesting tension in relation to the process of getting to know something and it becoming ‘known’. Whilst practicing a phenomenological attitude you interact with, discover the story of, and participate in the phenomenon in a way that keeps the sense of mystery alive. Through engaging in the process of ‘getting to know’ something, we also became more aware of the process of knowing itself. The phenomena that we choose to meet do not reveal themselves in their entirety to us immediately. You must meet them time and time again, and each time let go and allow yourself to respond differently and freshly to what you are seeing, similar to when you are authentically getting to know a new friend. Likewise for meeting anything new, if we just know something according to our primary experience of it restricts how fully we can actually meet it at all. The knowing that really matters for me, is the one that you can stand fully in, in your embodied sense of knowing that has arisen from your own experience of spending time with, and getting to know, the phenomenon directly.

Photo credit: Emma Kidd

Plants are particularly wonderful phenomena to study as they have a special character that creates form that dies and becomes simultaneously. If we follow the form on a plant, we are led into it’s organic movement. The movement that we can observe, such as small new leaves growing on much older parts of the lower part of the stem, allows us to experience not just spatial dynamics but also temporal. We can begin to live into the life and form of the plant coming into and out of being.

The Nature Institute – Mission: Nature around us is whole and interconnected. Though we are part of nature, we do not yet fathom her depths, and our actions do not embody her wisdom. A fundamental shift in our way of viewing the world is necessary if we would contribute to nature’s unity rather than dissolution. At The Nature Institute, we develop new qualitative and holistic approaches to seeing and understanding nature and technology. Through research, publications, and educational programs we work to create a new paradigm that embraces nature’s wisdom in shaping a sustainable and healthy future.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course, and this style of participatory learning, and very grateful to Craig and Henrike Holdrege for hosting it. Through this course, and my continued interest in, and practice of phenomenological inquiry, I have found a pathway to living knowledge. I have discovered the depth of potential in ‘getting to know’ life in a participatory way. Being able to stand fully in my own knowing, rather than just consuming fixed knowledge, is a much more enriching, satisfying way to learn about the world. It is a method that does not judge difference, but welcomes and appreciates it. For me, when engaging in this process, everything becomes so alive, unique and utterly fascinating. Life, and knowledge, become livelier when my ways of knowing become as dynamic as the part of life itself that I am getting to know.

In terms of creating a pathway of living knowledge on a larger scale, such as within education or organizations, we can ask ourselves how we can help an encounter to arise from within the individual that involves them and the phenomenon in question, rather than just answering questions that the individuals themselves have not asked. In turn this could allow people to become part of a living organization that they co-create through participating in asking these questions together, potentially adding a new wealth of value, an untapped resource of knowledge and experience, that the teachers, Directors and CEO’s, may as of yet, not have imagined possible.

About Emma Kidd

Emma Kidd is a researcher, writer, teacher, designer, facilitator, photographer and philosopher. Her work examines how humans can develop a dynamic way of seeing which is cultivated by participative enquiry and a deepening of our relationship to Nature and her dynamic organic systems. She teaches the practice of Phenomenology and offers a series of practical and interactive workshops designed to cultivate integrated ways of knowing within the individual and the organization. Part of her phenomenological work with plants is referenced in Henri Bortoft’s book “Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought” and she is a co-author of “Stories of the Great Turning” an inspirational collection of stories from a diverse collection of grass-roots sustainability projects. Her chapter is the story of her upcycling project, Emiliana Underwear (www.emilianaunderwear.wordpress.com) and she is the editor ofwww.sensinglife.net.

Ongoing phenomenological process for studying natural phenomena such as plants

Initial impression –

Allow yourself to be touched by something in the world and want to enter into a conversation with it.
How and where does it grow?
How does it place itself in the environment?
Be gentle in the first stages of ‘getting to know’.
Pay attention to your first impressions, note them down but don’t get attached to them.
Sketch or record in some way to ground your impressions.
Keep an open attentiveness in your sensing.
Experience the qualities without conceptualization.
See things freshly, or ‘new’, even the 1000th time (such as Thoreau).

Inner Picturing (Exact sensorial Imagination) –

Re-member your observations in your mind as concretely and intensely as possible.
Enter into whatever the encounter meant for you, feeling your way back through it internally.
After the encounter, the plant is no longer with us, but some of it remains in our memory, so notice what that is for you.
Notice what you can’t remember, and revisit those parts on your next observation.

Go into detail –

Let yourself be led by the phenomenon.
Use your tools as a sensing human being to open up to what the phenomenon has to offer.
Adapt yourself to what the phenomenon requires of you.
Note physical form and qualities.
Keep holding back from conceptual frameworks, or if you use it, make it conscious.
Describe in detail what you see.
Acknowledge that there is detail to be taken in, every visit, more than initially meets the eye.
Remember that the process is not about what you do, but what is there in front of you.
You are not trying to explain anything, just observe and participate.
“Let the thing speak” Goethe
Your understanding grows in conversation with the phenomenon, so keep at it.

Inner re-picturing (Exact sensorial imagination) –

When you just go into detail you enter a realm of form, pattern and relationship but you could forget that this is a dynamic, developing being. So repeating the exact sensorial imagination after every stage builds a living picture of the phenomenon inside you. Already in the plant’s completed form in a sense of time, process and life, so allow this to develop when you re-imagine the plant in your mind.
Re-member, re-create and re-form.
This is an inner corrective and a way of connecting deeply with the impressions that the world has left within you. In entering into the memory we are participating with the phenomenon with an inward activity, rather that the outward activity of observation. The process allows us to become aware of our own activity.
This is an inner corrective and a way of connecting deeply with the impressions that the world has left within you. In entering into the memory we are participating with the phenomenon with an inward activity, rather that the outward activity of observation. The process allows us to become aware of our own activity.

Realising the Pattern –

After re-visiting the phenomenon over several occasions, patterns within the phenomenon may begin to become apparent to you.
Patterns of form, quality, detail, or some repeated essence that feels essential to the phenomenon.
Through entering into form and movement, we participate in the living process and so details reveal themselves that may not be able in the first instance.
Through a process of continued conversation, outer observation and inner re-picturing, realizations of patterns, wholeness and connections have the potential to emerge, but this does take time, and commitment to the process of delicate empiricism that is required for phenomenological inquiries.

Comparing and Contrasting –

By comparing and contrasting phenomena, they illuminate each other.
For instance compare a plant in a sunny paddock with one growing in shaded woodland.
Notice the relationships of gesture and form within the particular context of each plant
Sometimes you can get stuck in the conversation of the inquiry, so comparison can help you to become unstuck and reveal new aspects to the phenomenon
Let one phenomenon illuminate the other, entering into one perspective to understand the other
Enter into a way of being that allows for a distinguishing process to arrive, if you compare something fairly close you will have more details to compare. (For example, two of the same plant in different growing conditions, rather than a plant and a cat).
If you pay attention there is always something new and fresh that breaks through any preconceptions.

There is no end….

The beauty and mystery of the natural phenomena surrounding us is such that as much as we may try, whether through phenomenology, or mechanistic experimentation, they may never fully become known and there will forever be something more, something deeper, left for us still to get to know.

Guest Article as featured on Transition Consciousness

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Guest Article: Emma Kidd – Featured on ‘The Transition of Consciousness’

“A Pathway to Living Knowledge” Course review – Part One

If we talk of deadly, let us note that the difference between life and death, so crystal clear in man, is somewhat veiled in other fields. A doctor can tell at once between the trace of life and the useless bag of bones that life has left; but we are less practised in observing how an idea, an attitude or a form can pass from the lively to the moribund. It is difficult to define but a child can smell it out.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space

In the early summer of 2012 I came across a short course that felt like it had been tailor made, just for me! Considering my passion for phenomenology and commitment to researching the act of getting to know the world in terms of itself, it simply could not have been more perfect. So, in September 2012 I attended this week-long course in the US with Craig and Henrike Holdrege, entitled “A Pathway to Living Knowledge”. The course was co-sponsored by Threefold Educational Center and The Nature Institute.

Craig Holdrege

I was taught by Craig Holdrege on the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College in 2008. He attended our week long session with Henri Bortoft, and then carried on the phenomenological work by spending a week with us on practicing and exploring Goethean Science. Craig is the director of the The Nature Institute which he co-founded 1998. “His passion is to develop what Goethe called “delicate empiricism” – an approach that learns from nature how to understand nature and is infused with a cautious and critical awareness of how intentions and habits of mind affect human understanding. His research takes two directions. In the first, he carries out studies of animals and plants that tell the story of these organisms as dynamic and integrated beings within the larger web of life. The comprehensive and holistic understanding of organisms provides the basis for his second area of focus – researching genetics and genetic engineering in relation to the broader context of internal and external ecology of living organisms. Craig has a Ph.D. in sustainability education from Prescott College in Arizona. He completed a Masters-level, non-degree program in phenomenological science at the Science Research Laboratory at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, and has a B.A. in philosophy from Beloit College.”1

Henrike Holdrege

On this short course in the US, I also had the pleasure of meeting Craig’s wife, who co-taught alongside him. “Henrike Holdrege is a co-founder of The Nature Institute. She is a mathematician and biologist, subjects she taught in public and Waldorf schools. At the Institute Henrike is involved in all aspects of the Institute’s life. She carries out research in projective geometry and into the phenomena of light and color. She helps with program conception and implementation and teaches courses in our education programs. She is the Institute’s finance manager, keeps the place beautiful, and basically steps in wherever help is needed.

Henrike teaches courses in projective geometry at the Institute as well as around the country. She is interested in leading people – especially those who “never liked math” – into unfamiliar thought territory. In projective geometry we have to let go of common thought habits in order to stretch our inner terrain. We discover thereby our ability to conceive of the invisible and enliven our thinking capacities. We build new “thought muscles” and gain insights that we can apply in everyday and professional life. In her work with the phenomenology of the visual world, she wants to help people become more attentive to the actual visual appearances and their relations; this activity opens up a deep appreciation for the qualities of light and color and is also a means of overcoming abstract habits of thought.”2

It was truly a pleasure to work with both Craig and Henrike for a whole week. Craig is as fundamental to the development of my passion and interest in practicing phenomenology as Henri Bortoft is. Together they both contributed to a way of seeing that grew in me that enables me to ‘see’ the dynamics of life, and this profoundly alters my ways of being, seeing and doing in the world, which I am profoundly grateful for. So it was great to be able to re-visit processes, practices and ideas together with Craig and Henrike, within the beautiful setting of early fall in Chestnut Ridge, New York state last fall.

Photo credit: Threefold Educational Center

The course focused on the nature of phenomenological inquiry, with its roots in Goethe’s approach. In essence, the question was: How can we develop capacities that allow the qualities and relationships inherent in the world to come to ever greater expression? As Steiner wrote, “to live in truth means, in the consideration of any given thing, that we attend to the inner experience that arises as we behold it.” The course was set to question how can we heighten that experience and observe, as Goethe asks, “who speaks here, the object or you?” Another question posed was, can we enhance our capacities and cultivate inner organs of perception? And so we set out to enter a pathway of experience and to practice phenomenological methodology in the exploration of natural phenomena.

Prior to the course I also attended a conference at the same Chestnut Ridge venue on ‘The Art and Science of Wholeness’, for which Craig was the keynote speaker. So my journey back into the dynamics of being started there. During his keynote speech Craig started by noting the importance of looking at the types of questions we use when we are working towards developing a living inquiry, and that we must become aware of the implications and assumptions held within the context and content of a question e.g. “What causes the disease?”. A question is just the tip of an iceberg of a worldview and way of being in the world. The act of questioning is in itself a part of something much larger than itself. Questioning is, in it’s nature, a relational, dynamic act of inquiry. It is an expression of already having met something, of having related with something. The expression of experience in questioning expresses both the knowing and unknowingness of something that has been touched, that we are then moved by. The consciousness of the phenomenon comes to movement through the questioning process. If the questions are open, arising out of having been touched by something in the world, they can form the seeds of a living inquiry.

Photo credit: Threefold Educational Center

Questions that go where awe and wonder arise, that emerge from an experience meeting the worlds mysterious depths, like a sunset, the night sky or the sea’s waves, create the container for a living inquiry to be born. The fundamental question that Craig put to us was ‘As educators, how can we help an encounter to arise from within the students that involves them and the world, rather than just answering questions that they themselves have not asked?’ This, for me, is the key to developing A Pathway to Living Knowledge, and is at the centre of the experiential workshops that I have since developed.

Craig, reflecting the essence of Goethe’s work with natural phenomena and also the work of Henri Bortoft, stated during the keynote that he feels that a living inquiry is a path of inquiry in which the world is an active participant, where you have respect for the encounter and a gentle, honest intention of getting to know it’s authentic self. We need to allow the world to speak in terms of itself. The living inquiry can also be called an open ended conversation. The open-endedness naturally arises when we sense the depth of the world, and of our inquiry. As we are in the process of getting to know it, in depth and detail, we can also be open to noticing how the quality of the questions change during the process of the questioning. We engage in a conversation with the part of the world that we felt drawn to turn towards, holding questions only as containers for process, bringing the encounter into consciousness without becoming attached to the questions.

An inquiry becomes dynamic and alive when we begin to understand ‘knowing’ as ‘becoming’, an evolutionary process that is as much an intrinsic and dynamic part of the world, as the world itself, rather than a fixed ‘knowledge’ that we statically project onto the world as our ‘ideas’ or ‘theories’. Through cultivating our ‘knowing’ as living process we may find a way into the world so that our thoughts and theories may emerge from the world itself.

Craig stressed that we must become aware of how much ‘thought’ influences life, and how many ‘things’ that we base our ideas, theories and unquestioned assumptions on actually turn out to be just ‘thoughts’. This occurs in life, research and especially in the Sciences. Rather than a research hypothesis – which rather assumes that you know what you want to get out of an inquiry in advance – to engage in a living ‘conversation’ with the world, we must openly be interested in getting to know it in terms of itself, not tell it what we think we already know about it and then set about proving it.

To enliven our inquiry we must use all of our available faculties of ‘knowing’, not just sense perception and intellect, but also imagination, intuition. We can bring form and process to movement within our imagination, and ‘see’ connections in the wider context by bringing observations and accounts of form, behaviour, movement, structure to life within our imagination. Intuitive moments may also spontaneously arise that can help to illuminate the wholeness of what we are encountering. The living inquiry must also take into consideration the inquirer, who must also work diligently to continually open and improve their capacity for critical thinking, so as not to fall back onto projecting static thoughts or generalization onto the subject of the inquiry – tending to your inner horizons, not just focusing blindly onto the outer horizon that you ‘think’ you see outside of you.

Following Goethe, I feel that this involves developing a dynamic, living way of seeing that itself may be fluid enough to follow the movement of the life of the phenomenon that you wish to get to know. This must be created to understand form as echoes of movement, which are often at first silent if they not visible to the sense world. The wholeness of a phenomenon gestures visibly in time and space, however it is no-thing, but also not a ‘thing’. A living inquiry tries to understand wholeness as an expression of the language of life.

During the week with Craig and Henrike, we did not study an abstract theory, nor be ‘filled like empty vessels’ with information. We were led from day one into our own living inquiries with the world around us.

To be continued in Part Two…

References

(1http://www.threefold.org/conferences/pathway_to_living_knowledge.aspx (2) http://www.threefold.org/conferences/pathway_to_living_knowledge.aspx

About Emma Kidd

Getting to know Life in terms of Itself

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And so it begins….

Approaching life, people, plants, situations – any phenomenon – as if engaging in conversation with a new friend. I have an open mind and an open heart. I hold an air of wonder, I carry a positive expectancy of as-of-yet undiscovered uniqueness, confident that I am getting to know something new but aware of the mystery of the unknown and the potential for wonder and discovery that this process of ‘getting to know’ may bring. We meet each other on equal terms, I am aware that neither party is more or less worthy of the right to exist than the other – and that both of us may stand to learn from each other. The exchange is light at first, but not superficial – and I don’t expect to get to know them suddenly all at once, or to have their entire being laid bare in the first instance. I appreciate the nature of the process, that little by little, bit by bit, they will reveal themselves to me, on their own terms and in their own time – and that it is a two way process. For they may only fully come into being to me, within me. I have to participate in the process, to live into their livingness, to enliven their stories, to be actively receptive to what they are gracious enough to share with me. The open heart and open mind work together in allowing the ‘something’ or ‘someone’ to fully come into being.

This is complimented by a degree of critical thinking – for allowing the ‘something’ to come fully into being, I need to tend to my own inner being also. I need to continually sort the wheat from the chaff, what is mine and what is there’s? Are they living into me, or I am living onto them. Is it their own? Or my projection of my own? If I were completely open, this ‘something’ would flow directly through me. If I am not open enough I deny them their livingness – for all I have to offer them are the dead, static frames into which I squeeze the life out of their livingness to make them fit. I bring a focus, which is my intention of ‘getting to know’. It is the openness that allows for discoveries to emerge, however it is a focused openness, as within the ‘conversation’ the intent is set for ‘getting to know’. I am not just tending to appearances, or repeating what I think or feel that I already know, but I am engaged in the dynamic act of know-ing.

There is no guarantee that the doing of this process will lead us where we want to be, we can only immerse ourselves in the process and see where we end up along the way. If the heart is open, but not focused on ‘getting to know’ we may attend to the ‘something’ and experience only what is immediate to our experience within the confines of past understanding. If the mind is open but not focused on ‘getting to know’ it know no more than that which is quite immediately apparent in how we react to it. So the ‘something’ may appear interesting, shocking, dull or uncomfortable, short or tall, but we skim over the details, we do not notice the uniqueness or particularities, nor the complexity and dynamism of what is being presented to us. It is in the details, in the parts, and in the rich context of which every element is a part – which is where the ‘something’ comes into being. That is where the ‘true’, authentic know-ing may arise – and so, these details, parts and context need consciously attending to if we want to truly get to know something, beyond just first impressions and appearances. To ensure that we are honestly getting to know someone we must take care not to project our ideas, theories and judgments onto them. Otherwise we are not open to letting them reveal themselves – instead we will get an inauthentic picture of ‘knowing’ based only on what we think that we already know.

Every ‘something’ or ‘someone’ is completely unique and dynamic, even if it’s dynamism and uniqueness are not immediately apparent to our thoughts or our senses. All ‘something’s’ are highly contextual, being and having been involved in many complex relationships – even if they are not immediately apparent. Only a deeper inquiry, such as the open and engaged intent of wholly ‘getting to know’ will, with time and continued participation, reveal the complexity and richness of it’s context and it’s relationships with the world. When I gain a richer picture of who ‘someone’ is, feel like I am know-ing them, but then ‘boom’ something completely out of the ordinary occurs, or a paradox arises, that this is when I truly feel like I am getting to know them. This opens my heart and my mind further, and stimulates my curiosity to continue getting to know them, further and deeper.

Everything surrounding us is imbued with the mystery of the unknown, if you can choose to let go for moment of everything you think that you already ‘know’. The curiosity from seeing with ‘fresh new eyes’ emerges when you open to the depth and mystery of the unknown, and from being content with dwelling in a process of know-ing, not known-ing – observing, not projecting. This can be cultivated in any situation and within every experience of ‘getting to know’. Expect their to be mystery, expect the unexpected to emerge, and expect there to be something new to be experienced or ‘known’.

Approach every encounter of ‘getting to know’ with a warm, open-minded, open-hearted greeting. Hello! Greet the ‘something’ as if it is ‘someone’ that you are pleased to meet, with a sense of anticipation of what is yet to come. “Ciao!” “Good morning!”. The tone of your welcome can set the tone for the rest of your encounter, and the conversation which then emerges. When you come face to face with ‘something’, you can often sense whether you are carrying a pre-occupation or judgment that is carried in your tone of ‘voice’, and non-verbally in the tone of your intention. Feel the difference between a closed, judgmental frame of mind – and an open, welcoming, willing gesture of ‘getting to know’. We need to let go of the closed, judgmental frame of mind and to cultivate a curious, welcoming openness – the inner ‘Hello!’. Once we are living this warm, open gesture of intent, we can more directly begin the receptive process of ‘getting to know’.

“Openness is required before truth unfolds and at the same time, as truth unfolds, it produces openness. Here we have what is known as ‘hermeneutical circularity’.” http://beliefinstitute.com/article/importance-hermeneutics

Learning to embrace Diversity

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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

Living Questions

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Aside from the type of logic we use, as I mentioned in my last post, the dynamics of knowing also depend on the types of questions we ask, and of becoming aware of the implications and assumptions held within the context and content of a question e.g. “What causes the disease?”.

A question is actually just the tip of an iceberg, encompassing a much deeper worldview and way of being in the world, and is a part of something much larger than itself. According to the scientist and researcher Craig Holdrege, who studies biological life in context at the Nature Institute in New YorkState, questioning is in it’s nature a relational, dynamic act of inquiry. It is an expression of already having met something, of having related with something, as the expression of experience in questioning demonstrates both the knowing and unknowingness of something that has been touched, that we are then moved by enough to question. When I observe my own thinking process in this way, I can gain an insight into the dynamics of my knowing through the questions that I ask. If I choose for the questions to be open, and arising out of having been directly inspired by something in the world, they can form the seeds of a living inquiry.

A living inquiry of knowing the world is a path of inquiry in which the phenomenon I want to get to know becomes an active participant. I have respect for the dynamism of the encounter and hold an open, honest intention of getting to know it in terms of itself – not out of what I think that I already know. Judgment, solidity and certainty are released to allow the world to speak through it’s own language of being. A living inquiry can also be considered as an open ended conversation, this type of open dialogue naturally arises when we sense the depth of the world, and of our inquiry simultaneously. To do this I engage, as if in a conversation, with the part of the world that I feel drawn to turn towards, observing it’s parts, qualities and particularities. By engaging in multiple occasions of directly participating with, and experiencing the phenomenon; and through exploring it’s living context and comparing the parts to the whole, I can bring the encounter into being without becoming attached to the questions themselves. In his most recent work “Taking Appearance Seriously”, the sadly late, and very wonderful, philosopher of science and phenomenological scholar Henri Bortoft aims to show how an inquiry becomes dynamic and alive when we begin to understand ‘knowing’ as ‘becoming’. He sees it as an evolutionary process that is as much an intrinsic and dynamic part of the world, as the world itself; rather than a fixed ‘knowledge’ that we statically project onto the world through our organising ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’.

Sensing Life

Wake up and smell the roses….

Tag Archives: Taking Appearance Seriously

Part 1 – The Democratisation of Knowledge

What the Frack?!?

Taking Appearance Seriously

Part Two of a guest article featured Transition Conciousness

Guest Article: Emma Kidd – “A Pathway to Living Knowledge” Course review – Part Two

Ongoing phenomenological process for studying natural phenomena such as plants

Guest Article as featured on Transition Consciousness

Guest Article: Emma Kidd – Featured on ‘The Transition of Consciousness’

Getting to know Life in terms of Itself

Learning to embrace Diversity

Living Questions