Self-Exclusion: The Abstract Root of Our Modern Scientific, Psychological, Social and Environmental Crisis — and Its Natural Remedy

Alan Rayner
1 min readNov 4, 2021
Breathing Space’ (Oil painting oncanvas by Alan Rayner, 2002) Spring IS Inspiring. New leaves open stomatal windows to sky. Sand Martins swirl down from migration towards water. Egrets flutter past. A white-ribbed Silver Birch, rooted to rocky diaphragm, transforms crimson lung-branches into leaves. Coral bark fires imagination. Pussy Willow erupts into incandescent catkins. Blackthorn snow-storms. Lichens pulsate with their own slow rhythm. Space receives within and without the embodied water flows of life. In, out, together, to gather. Implicit Human Being. In Formational Lining. Attuned.

Every living being has a unique, receptive-in-responsive self/awareness, which simultaneously both influences and is influenced by its contextual neighbourhood (https://admrayner.medium.com/self-in-neighbourhood-neighbourhood-in-self-the-comprehensive-situational-awareness-of-natural-ae62ede623bf ).

Please bear this in mind whenever you glibly tell someone to ‘be objective’, ‘not take it personally’, ‘lose yourself’, ‘disregard ego’, ‘be your own boss’, ‘be independent’, ‘take control’, ‘stay positive’, ‘do anything you want’, ‘not let others affect you’, ‘be successful’ etc, etc.

It’s that kind of compassion-less, unreasonable, dishonest nonsense that resides at the root of our modern scientific, psychological, social and environmental crisis, preventing human understanding and flourishing.

It can be remedied by appreciating our natural self-inclusion within each others’ neighbourhood, which arises ultimately from the mutually inclusive, co-creative relationship between receptive spatial stillness and responsive energetic motion in all material bodies.

See more at http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion

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Alan Rayner

Alan Rayner is an evolutionary ecologist, writer and artist, who is pioneering the philosophy of natural inclusion