How Did I Become Aware of Natural Inclusion?
In this, my hundredth and perhaps final Medium article, I turn to the question of how I came to prepare the preceding ninety-nine.
It’s a question I’ve been asked
It’s a question I’ve asked myself
It’s not a straightforward question for me to answer
In incremental steps from beginning to end
Because although it has entailed passing through a number of transitions
Perhaps three major transitions
These have not taken me anywhere that’s new to me
They have felt more like a return journey
From somewhere remote, lifeless and loveless
To what I was aware of all along
But didn’t know how to express
In a way that would be understood
.
The first 48 years of my life took me along a course that became devoted to the study of fungi and their relationships with other life forms and habitats, especially trees and woodlands. This study was made, however, within the context of a scientific and academic culture from which I felt increasingly alienated and that progressively nibbled away at my confidence until I reached a point when I couldn’t continue. I came to feel that either something was foundationally wrong with the culture or something was foundationally wrong with me. It was and is a very insecure feeling. Sensing that I had voyaged very far from home, I abandoned ship in mid-ocean. And drifted.
Within 2 years, I became explicitly aware, in a visionary moment, of what I now call ‘natural inclusion’. I embarked on a new voyage of discovery — or rediscovery — which, as it turned out took me even further from mainstream thought. But this voyage also brought me much closer to home and what I feel I have always known, since early childhood, but suppressed through a series of abandonments made in a vain effort to conform with societal expectations.
The first major abandonment had come
When I was required at school
To study ‘hard science’
Physics, chemistry and an underpinning of maths
And forgo any more than lay interest in arts and humanities
In order to study biology
.
I wanted to study biology
Because, during walks with my father,
I had fallen in love with life in the wild
Intuitively sensing the patterns within its variety
How these relate to patterns in landscape and water
And arise as manifestations of flow
Creating and following channels of least resistance
I delight in the way this intuition
Enables me with swelling heart
To view different species as friends
And to discover new ones
Each with their own profound story to tell
Concerning why and how they come to be
As they are
Where they are
.
When I was around eight years old, having recently made the trip with my family back ‘home’ to London from where I was born and lived my earliest years in Nairobi, Kenya, I contracted measles, the first of many childhood illnesses that confined me to bed and disrupted my schooling. My father sat by my bedside and read stories to me about the planets and outer space, infecting me with his love of scientific exploration. I was given books to read about natural history and I learned to identify the garden birds in the tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I made watercolour paintings of these and others that I had never seen from illustrations on the pages of ‘Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds’. Then, whenever I was well enough, I was taken out into the countryside and spent many happy days bird-spotting for myself. I was taken on my first ‘fungus foray’ to a place called Burnham Beeches, west of London. It was led by the redoubtable figure of a man called Bayard Hora and I was awestruck by what I many years later described as ‘The Fountains of the Forest’ as they erupted from ground and trees in manifold shapes and colours, not least the legendary ‘fly agaric’ (Amanita muscaria), the ‘parasol’ (Macrolepiota procera) and numerous ‘brittle gills’ (Russula spp). I found that their Latin names came easily to me and I delighted in showing off my recall to peers and teachers.
Over following years, I became familiar with more and more of the British flora, fauna and fungi, filling my head with thousands of Latin names and associated mental images not only of the organisms themselves but also of the habitats in which they flourished and the ground-shaping processes that formed them. I loved the companionship of like-minded others on natural history walks and fungus forays, and the thrill of new finds and sharing knowledge.
But, there was a problem. To study biology as a ‘science’ was not the same as experiencing ‘life in the wild’ in the caring companionship of others. If anything, it was wild life’s antithesis:- a competition to be first or best while following strict codes of practice designed to eliminate subjective human ‘error’ and conform to an unquestionable norm prescribed by prior authority.
I was not enamoured with numerical figures and mental fixes
Mechanics and technicalities
Atomised life in dead boxes
So what perverse logic was it
That forced this choice upon me?
.
It took me a long while to realise
But meanwhile, I persevered
Never quite losing my original feeling for pattern, process and relationship
Even bringing this to my understandings of hard science and maths
For I couldn’t learn anything without it
But sensing it being increasingly threatened
By an unforgiving attitude of mind
Hell-bent on mastery
Dismissive of mystery
Intolerant of error and unpredictability
Viewing life as a purposeless eliminative struggle
Between selfish genetic survival machines
.
The second great abandonment came
When I followed my father’s footsteps
Not only to a Cambridge degree in natural sciences
Specialising in Botany
But into postgraduate mycological research
In pursuit of an academic career
.
This brought me into full exposure to the glare of that attitude of mind
Divorced objectively from its subject of study
Cut off from feeling
By definition
That idolises quantity
Without regard for quality
Forsakes companionship
For competition
Forsakes artistry
For technicality
Rendering all that doesn’t make the grade
By complying with its exacting standards
Worthless
.
This kind of science, I discovered
Was a far cry from what I’d loved
On fungus forays with my father and his companions
In search of beauty and variety
And the sheer joy of discovery and sharing knowledge
.
Instead the emphasis was on utility and methodology
Taming both organism and researcher
Under controlled conditions
Homogenising mathematically, genetically and intellectually
In library, laboratory, digital computer
Agarose gel
And industrial scale fermentation
Far-removed from reality
No wildness allowed
Even in the experimental plots in the timber-producing forest where I did my field work
In order to ensure conformity with abstract rules
.
I tried to conform,
I really did
To do things by the book
To keep my cultures as they should be
To measure accurately
To isolate with care
Free from contaminating interference
To check my work
And that of those I mentored
For consistency with others’
Described in ‘literature’
.
But that’s when I found
What others said
Even in the most vaunted of places
Was full of contradictions
Inaccuracies
Mistakes
Generalisations
Prejudice
At odds with my actual experience
Or so it seemed to me
.
I began to lose trust
In others’ judgement
In my own judgement
Aware as I had always been of my capacity for error
The wildness within me
Marked wrong in school tests
I faltered
And, with confidence fading
Made one last effort
To leave behind in my wake
A painting
Called ‘Fountains of the Forest’
Celebrating all that my erstwhile friends
The fungi
Had taught me
Concerning their lives in the company of trees
Which none of my peers understood
Though a few did try to do so
Only to be blocked by hard-line thought
.
Since childhood, painting had been a source of respite for me as a way to express my feelings for the natural world, and as an antidote to the rigidity of scientific objectivism. Since 1976 there had been a long lapse, except for four paintings I had made around 1990 for my two daughters, Hazel and Philippa. Now I began painting again in earnest. And not only painting, but writing poetry — sometimes alongside or as an inspiration for a painting.
Although I did not initially realise this, all my paintings made since 1969 illustrate a shift from the abstract perception of space, time and material boundaries as sources of definitive separation between independent objects, to recognising them instead as mutually inclusive sources of natural continuity and dynamic distinction between flow-forms. In effect this represents a shift from rigidly static to fluidly dynamic framings of reality: from abstract ‘freeze-framed geometry’ to natural ‘flow geometry’ — from ‘abstract exclusion to natural inclusion’. They all depict imaginary scenes, based on real experience and study of natural form, which often come into my mind ‘out of the blue’ rather than deliberate intent. One that I made at the time of my ‘second great abandonment’ graphically illustrated what I recognised unconsciously but not consciously:-
I withdrew into the wasteland -
My final abandonment
To consider my options
For a change of career
But none came near to anything
That I felt I could do
And so began my return journey
Starting where I’d left off
But now without any funded research programme
Or ready-made publication venue
To speak of,
Required by my colleagues to ‘pull my weight’
As a ‘research-inactive’ liability
By teaching a heavy load
Yet free at last to abandon
The pretence of conforming
With objective expectations
And renew my love of life in the wild
With all its twists and turns and surprises
Seeing straight through the facade of false logic
That sought to tame, control and predict it
Within a cage of fixed boundaries
.
It was then that awareness of natural inclusion
Came back to me
In a way that I could now express
At least to my own satisfaction
In prose and in paintings and poetry
Conveying receptive-responsive relationship
Between infinite spatial stillness
And energetic motion
In the co-creation of all material forms
As figures emerging from ground
.
So simple I could scarcely believe it
So obvious to me as a child
When I noticed what permitted or impeded my movements
By way of openness, liquidity and solidity
Elemental Air, Water and Earth
Enlivened by Fire
Burning in the Endless Freedom of Space
Far removed from containment in boxes
Intangible, invisible
Yet here, there and everywhere
Eternally
Without limit
.
One beckoning image, especially, came to me out of the blue, along with a poem, to symbolise this epiphany, this turning and returning point of innermost receptivity:-
You ask me who you are; To tell a story you can live your life by; A tail that has some point; That you can see; So that you no longer; Have to feel so pointless; Because what you see is what you get; If you don’t get the meaning of my silence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask me for illumination; To cast upon your sauce of doubt; Regarding what your life is all about; To find a reason for existence; That separates the wrong; From righteous answer; In order to cast absence out; To some blue yonder; Where what you see is what you get; But you don’t get the meaning of my darkness; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You look around the desolation; Of a world your mined strips bare; You ask of me in desperation; How on Earth am I to care?; I whisper to stop telling stories; In abstract words and symbols; About a solid block of land out there; In which you make yourself a declaration; Of independence from thin air; Where what you see is what you get; When you don’t get the meaning of my present absence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask of me with painful yearning; To resolve your conflicts born of dislocation; From the context of an other world out where; Your soul can wonder freely; In the presence of no heir; Where what you see is what you get; When you don’t get the meaning of my absent presence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet
You ask me deeply and sincerely; Where on Earth can you find healing; Of the yawning gap between emotion; And the logic setting time apart from motion; In a space caught in a trap; Where what you see is what you get;
And in a thrice your mind is reeling; Aware at last of your reflection; In a place that finds connection; Where your inside becomes your outside; Through a lacy curtain lining; Of fire, light upon the water
Now your longing for solution; Resides within and beyond your grasp; As the solvent for your solute; Dissolves the illusion of your past; And present future
Now your heart begins to thunder; Bursting hopeful with affection; Of living light for loving darkness; Because you ain’t felt no thing yet
.
So life evolves in response to receptive invitation — through natural inclusion — not selective exclusion. We are called to evolve, not forced*. Life is a gift of natural energy flow, which we receive with grace, care for protectively, and pass on — not a competitive struggle for existence in a sealed box. We breathe life, we don’t suffocate it. Ain’t that a relief?
Now all I had learned on my travels
Fell into a new kind of place
Even maths and hard sciences
No longer at odds
With Art or Humanity
But serving to show
A side of the story
Insufficient to stand on its own
.
So that’s how I returned to my senses
In three stages
Three abandonments of the abandonments
That had taken me so far from love
.
Stage 1
Abandonment of the abandonment of objective abstraction
That cuts what is in here apart from what is out there
.
Stage 2
Abandonment of the abandonment of mechanistic focus
That places tangible utility before lovable beauty
.
Stage 3
Abandonment of the abandonment of life’s purpose
That denies the call to live, love and be loved
In receptive-responsive relationship
With neighbours and neighbourhood
.
Quite simply, becoming aware of natural inclusion gave me back my calling and purpose in life, beyond mechanical utility. It validated my aesthetic appreciation of all natural material form as flow-form within a receptive continuum of space. It enabled me to dispense with any residual perception of objective self-isolation from my natural neighbours and neighbourhood. And it made sense of a great many scientific findings that make no sense in terms of definitive theory.
Perhaps it can do the same for you?
Quite Simply:- Natural Inclusion is ‘What’s Happening’ — The Flow of Life, Not the Frigidity of Definitive Abstraction.
Or, more fully:- Natural inclusion is the mutually inclusive, co-creative, receptive-responsive relationship between intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in the being, becoming and evolutionary diversification of all material bodies, including our own. Exploring Natural Inclusion | What is Natural Inclusion ? (spanglefish.com)
See:-
This is why becoming aware of natural inclusion matters:- http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion/index.asp?pageid=701959
- See this simple illustration:- https://youtu.be/3Xu0lg0vz5c
.
Postscript 1 (added on 14/12/2021)
Middle Earth
Life forms in the balance
Between flow and counterflow
Into and out from the other
In response to innermost calling
Amidst infinite expanse
A love triangle in the making of heartfelt experience
At the seat of all knowing
In the wisdom of not knowing
The natural inclusion of being in becoming
The in-breath in out-breath
In common passion
.
Postscript 2 (added 19/12/2021)
The Nature of Excitation
IN SUMMARY:- we will have NO HOPE of release from the iniquities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and falsities of objective rationalisation until and unless we recognise the receptive influence of omnipresent space and the responsive flow of energetic information around every body. ONLY THEN will a truly compassionate and regenerative way of life become possible.
How does it feel
And what does it mean
To be excited?
.
Do you feel it in your bones
In your brain
In your gut
In your heart
In your gonads?
.
In which case
How do these places feel about it
And how would you know how they feel
Without imagining your self within them?
.
Is excitation something you can measure
In units of mass, speed and size?
.
If not, why not?
Is excitation essential to life?
If not, where would we be without it?
Could we be anywhere
Other than nowhere and everywhere at once?
.
What kind of existence would that be?
Devoid of form and movement
Other than the void itself -
That limitless expanse of frictionless space
Universal darkness, stillness, transparency, timelessness
Absolute nothingness
The infinite presence of absence
That can only be what it is
And never become what it could be
Without excitation
Intangible motion
The essence of time
Current
Energy flow
From incoherence to coherence to incoherence
Heat and light
Chaos and order
Entropy and negentropy
Disinformation and information
Degeneration and generation
In regeneration
Betwixt and enveloping
All material form
In local gravitational in levitational
Receptive in responsive
Packaging
But not in itself
Having mass, speed or size
Pure motion
Emotion
Looking for somewhere to go
Awaiting manifestation
To make something of life
Something of light
That can be seen and touched
Both material and immaterial
In natural flow-form
In animal, vegetable, fungal, bacterial and mineral
Expressions
In solid, liquid, gas and plasma
Suffused by void
Calling into place in time
Both tangible and intangible
Measurable and immeasurable
Together
Neither one or other
Nor all one
Alone
.
Postscript 3 (added 01/01/2022)
Letting Go & Holding On
A New Year’s Resolution of Human Conflict
In the dead end
It is just as nonsensical
To speak of being totally interconnected
As it is
To speak of being totally separate
.
Neither is possible
In this world as it is
Each is an expression of psychological attachment
To an unrealistic ideal
A rock or a hard place
Egoic fortitude or collective concrete
Where all is at standstill
.
To let go of one
To hold on to the other
Is no way to go
.
Each needs to be loosened
With infinite grace
If life is to flow
And love is to grow
.
Postscript 4 Summary of a Presentation for Complex System Thinkers (added 09/01/2022)
Natural inclusion: The receptive simplicity in the heart of complexity and a compassionate, regenerative and creative community life
In this presentation I offer the fundamental natural evolutionary principle of ‘natural inclusion’ as a simple way to understand the complexities of the natural world in which we human beings are dynamically included. In summary, natural inclusion can be described as the mutually inclusive, co-creative, receptive-responsive relationship between intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in the being, becoming and evolutionary diversification of all material bodies, including our own.
For millennia this understanding has eluded us due to the prevalence of a definitive mode of perception, and associated abstract rationality, which either objectively isolates or conflates the human observer from or with what is observed. Such perception effectively removes the central coordinating influence, by way of the innermost spatial receptivity, which exists in the gravitational core of all natural organisations, from sub-atomic to galactic in scale. Consequently the default condition of Nature is paradoxically presupposed to be either static or random, whereupon movement and order are believed primarily to be brought about by executive mechanical force situated somewhere ineffable. Many modern scientific concepts and governmental paradigms continue to be founded on this divisive and/or oppressive belief, including Darwinian ‘natural selection’. These are a source of profound misunderstanding as well as psychological, social and environmental harm.
We will have hope of release from the iniquities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and falsities of objective rationalisation only when we recognise the receptive influence of omnipresent space and the responsive flow of energetic information around every body. Only then will a truly compassionate, creative and regenerative way of life become possible.
Postscript 5 (added 21/01/2022)
We Are Not Dust
No, we are not dust
Dust is made from us
Not us from dust
We are the untouchables
Who co-create your worlds
Your consciousness -
Space:
The presence of receptive influence
Everywhere;
Light:
The occurrence of responsive motion
Somewhere
Stillness and Current
Combining in place-time
As love in life and life in love
The mutually inclusive embrace of material flow-form
A holy marriage
Never to be split asunder
Until and unless
Friction disintegrates its coherence
Until we meet again
In joyful communion
Somewhere
Sometime
.
Postscript 6 (added 04/02/2022)
The Lion’s Share
When you see me
Doing what I do
To serve my need
For self-sustenance
.
As I feel that stirring
In my hollow inside
Disturbing
The tranquillity of my day in the sun
Calling me and my mates to attention
Spurring
Us
To prepare for action
Tensing our muscles
From relaxation
Narrowing down our awareness
From peaceful sensation
Gathering in the sights, sounds and tastes
Smells, caresses and irritations
Impinging from all around
Into singling out
With forward focus
And pricked ears
Our alert bodies crouching with intent
Until the moment comes
Without pausing to think
To spring, rush, pounce, seize
Ingest fresh warmth
From silenced stillness
Returning to grace
From fright
As I lie down to sleep
Contented
Purring
Until the next stirring
.
Come inside me
In your imagination
Feel how I feel
In tune with my body
In tune with my surroundings
Responding receptively
To what comes and goes
In rhythms
.
Please don’t project
Onto me
Your own estranged psychology
Uprising from your dread of night
And worship of light
Which makes you split your sides
Into black and white
And cut your self apart
From where you are
And where you came from
By means of what you laughably call
‘Natural selection, or
The preservation of favoured races
In the struggle for life’
Which would be funny
If it wasn’t so sad
So bad
For you, for me, for us and the world
That we depend upon
For dear life
.
A psychology rooted not in any natural sense
But in the false exclusion or confusion of matter
From or with the receptive space
Within, without, throughout and all about
That pervades us all
Quite naturally
As dynamic inclusions of itself
In flowing forms of life
Dwelling in the current
From then to then
There to there
Never stopping for an instant
To disappear without trace
.
.
.
Into those width-less points, lines and planes
That you impose
From your distanced perspective
The frozen geometry of abstract treason
That puts us in a cage
Caught in suspended animation
And calls it a ‘whole’
That fearful man-trap you use
To rule the world
To rule the waves
Calling your royalty
Victorious, happy and glorious
Reigning supreme over us
To serve as your slaves
…
No, I am no sovereign
I do not define to rule
So, please do not call me King
And do not either call me
Selfish or altruistic
A prey
To the call of my genes
For neither is viable
.
No, I am not in it to win it
At others’ expense
That competitive game of zero sum
That you play with your minds
In gladiatorial arenas
.
I am as you are
Should you care to admit it
Behind your high fences
Needful
.
.
.
Can you hear me?
A call of the wild
The silence inside my roar
Which hungers for life
To come my way
As inspiration
A gift from death
To be received, cherished and passed on
In continuous relay
As energy recycles
In natural currency
Not financial security
From the sun on my back
To the soil beneath my clawed paws
Through the grass to the ungulates
Expiring through my jaws
To the microbes and fungi
That wait for their turn
To channel
Through the roots to the shoots
That spread solar arrays
To feed the flowers of receptivity
In radiance
That seed the regeneration
Again and again
In evolutionary uprising
With gathering momentum
In biosphere
From thin film to forest
.
Until and unless
Your Kingdom come
And takes us all away
.
So, please get real
Take your place in the deal
Allow how you feel
In your heart of devotion
To guide your emotion
And reason to be
You call it love
I believe
But then proceed to ignore it
Thinking it weak
Unaccountable
In your desire to be strong like me
Hah!
.
Stop fancying your self
Above all the rest
In that Great Chain of Being
From Top to Bottom
And see yourself we-ing
In diverse community
Not singular unity
Don’t take your leave from us
Just try to recall
As dear Desmond once said
In stark naked honesty
.
.
.
‘Even a space ape must urinate’
Need I say more?
…..
NB I was moved to write this by being shown this:- https://sovereignnature.com/nature-speaks
Postscript 7 (Added 30/03/2022)
At the centre of every thing is nothing: The elementary mathematics of natural inclusion, which rescues life from fixture
There is a kind of unkind mathematics, which immobilizes life by definition. At its dead centre is a material point within a cubical spatial frame, which can only be moved by ineffable mechanical force imposed from outside. This is the kind of mathematics I was taught at school. How about you? I didn’t understand it. Nor did I understand the categorical treatment of physical reality it gives rise to. It is inherently paradoxical, as Godel’s theorem and the paradox of the Cretan liar (who says all Cretans are liars) make clear. It causes massive muddle and gets us into trouble of the kind that can even make us kill one another.
There is another kind of mathematics that makes natural sense, breathing life into material form. At its vital centre is a receptive point of intangible space, a ‘zero-point’ which attracts energetic motion into continuous circulatory formation around itself. A point in the ‘place time’ of every ‘thing’ (i.e. material body) as a dynamic local inclusion of space.
Its essence is startlingly simple. It begins in ‘round one’, not ‘square one’. See https://lnkd.in/dvj4UwdQ
.
The Allness of Me
In radiant receptive awareness
That sees both the tangible
In the intangible
And the intangible
In the tangible
The motion in the stillness
And the stillness in the motion
Goes so much wider and deeper
Than the wholeness of me
Caught in momentary standstill
Excluding what’s been
And what’s yet to become
As if you and me
Are object and subject
Framed in definitive rigidity
Not beholden to each other
In vibrant life
.
You can’t have half a hole
But you can have half a whole
Therein resides the difference
Between being alive and dropping dead
Natural inclusionality and abstract rationality
If you seek the murder weapon
Destroying life on Earth
Look no further than Occam’s razor
And the Law of the Excluded Middle
…
Disentangled Life
It all gets in quite a muddle
Doesn’t it?
Full of contradictions
When we try to define
What is and isn’t
Or treat those two impostors both the same
Until and unless
What is eternal and omnipresent -
Immaterial void
And what is transient and local -
Material in formation
Transcendent and immanent
Are understood to be distinct
But mutually inclusive
Neither one or the other
Nor one and the same
Whereupon all opposition
Resolves into natural communion
Neither divided nor united
But co-creative
The consonance and the dissonance
The stillness and the excitation
In variations on a theme
Neither enigmatic
Nor straightforward
But all that comes and goes
In flows
….
Postscript 8 (added 02/04/2022)
The Zero in the Light
Many years ago, my scientist father recorded in a baby book that when I was 15 months old I said something in Polish that he translated as ‘Look at the Light’, but to me reads more like ‘See the zero in the light’
Whatever that might or might not mean, the imagery of a zero-point within a swirl of light has become very important to me and resides at the core of my awareness of what I call ‘natural inclusion’. It features also in many of my paintings, not least the one I call ‘Holding Openness’.
To me it signifies ‘the receptive simplicity in the heart of complexity’ and the way out from the abstract rationality of conflict and opposition, into a more compassionate, caring and co-creative way of life. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alan-rayner-258976a_light-darkness-zero-activity-6915952814712074240-tKhL?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web
…
Postscript 9 (Added 29/10/2022)
Waging Peace
To wage Peace
In a world at War With itself
Is the burden
Peculiar
To the soft-hearted warrior
Receptive to all around
Seeing both sides
In every argument
As partial truths
That can only make sense
When combined
Within each other’s care
Where only love can dare
To breach those walls
Forbidding entrance
To what’s ruled out of bounds
By preconception
Dividing or uniting
What’s within
And what’s without
With no room left
For doubt —
That garden of possibility
Whence creativity blooms
In vulnerable beauty
