NATURAL TOGETHERNESS - REASON TO LOVE OUR ‘ENEMY’
Alan Rayner
Our vulnerability, the source of our fear that brings enmity and war, can also be the inspiration for a loving feeling of togetherness, through which our differences can be transformed into compassionate, co-creative relationships with one another and our vital, living space.
HUMAN HISTORY records a catalogue of assault upon one another and the living
world. Increasingly, this assault has been justified as a means of eliminating
whatever is regarded as ‘evil’ or a ‘threat to Peace
and Security’, and so has a very different character from the killing
that is a vital inclusion in great natural evolutionary cycles of production
and consumption, regeneration and degeneration. What is the source of
this human enmity? Why must we go on killing ourselves? Is there a way
out of the logic that leads to violation? Here, I want to explore these
questions in terms of the way we perceive space and boundaries and our
corresponding concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
I will suggest that a radical inversion of habitual views that excommunicate
us from nature and one another, and are deeply embedded in our culture,
our science and our technologies, can give us every reason to come to
love what we might otherwise perceive as our ‘enemy’. And
this inversion is grounded not only in our everyday experience but also
in our scientific knowledge, if only we allow ourselves to perceive in
a different way.
I consider that the source of our enmity is a deeply divisive illusion, originating in our primary human need to sustain ourselves as land-inhabiting creatures and reinforced in our scientific and mathematical philosophies. This illusion leads us unrealistically to isolate ourselves - and everything else - from the receptive space that permeates within, through and around us all.
Imagine standing and looking at a tree. What keeps you apart from the tree? Two 'things', you might answer. Firstly, some thing literally beneath your stance, some seemingly solid substance, the ground beneath your feet that roots those equally solid-seeming 'material bodies' of you and the tree to the spot, as fixtures. Secondly, air, something seemingly insubstantial, some invisible 'empty space' that puts distance between you and the tree, so you feel no affinity with it. Moreover, the tree’s seeming superiority, towering above you, threatens your very existence should you get too close: it might squash you. So, to prevent that happening, you arm yourself with a chain saw and cut the tree down. But, just as you have severed the trunk from its roots, gravity brings it crashing down upon your head. Your fear, in making an enemy of and seeking to overcome the tree, has brought about just what you sought to avoid. The hateful thing has scared you to death!
Now, imagine that the air and ground become water, and your lungs become gills (so you don’t drown!). All of a sudden your relationship with the tree is transformed. You are together, bathed and life-supported in an endless common pool which reaches all around and permeates deeply within you through the pores in your skin or bark or leaves, your cell membranes, your molecules. Every move you make is reciprocated by the pool and a change in the relative position of the tree. As you take water in, your body inflates. As you let water out, your body deflates. Both you and the pool are tidal breathing spaces of reciprocal exchanges between insides and outsides, coupled through your bodily boundaries. You and the tree are not wholes apart, sealed and independent bodies, but holeynesses together, necessarily porous embodiments of the pool. You are each couples of inner and outer, pooled together. Your bodily boundaries distinguish you and the tree as uniquely situated identities, but do not sever you apart as isolated entities. Actually, these boundaries are the site of your co-creative relationship, the seat of your consciousness where your inner self 'individual' aspects are brought into communion with your outer self 'collective' aspects. You are a local aspect of the tree’s collective identity. The tree is a local aspect of your collective identity. You are not independent bodies, nor are you united indistinguishably in a uniform field: you are waves, resonant inner-outer vibrations, waving correspondence, transmitting to and receiving from one another in a wavy sea of common space.
These two scenarios depict two very different ways of perceiving space and boundaries, the former from a detached standpoint, the latter from an immersed feeling. But which of these is most realistic? Predominantly our human answer to this question has been that of the detached observer, an answer that corresponds with all kinds of rationalistic, objective philosophies, from Parmenides and Aristotle to Bacon and Descartes. And this answer also continues to underpin much modern science. We try to isolate nature in a ‘box’, a fixed frame of reference, and view it from outside, thereby concerning ourselves, like Newton, only with the distribution of matter through empty space.
It is easy to understand our attachment to detachment in a world where ground seems so solid and air so empty. In this world we rely on our physical senses, especially our binocular vision, to locate sources of food and danger. We are great ‘sorter-outers’, and ‘seeing is believing’ - a fact that illusionists take advantage of. What we cannot detect explicitly with our senses, we are prone to ignore as ‘nothing’ - an absence that isn’t a presence. Indeed, the very idea of this absence, this ‘void’ seems terrifying, so we hasten away from it, seeking heavenly illumination rather than abysmal darkness.
Although the civilizations and technologies we have forged through this rationalistic detachment have rewarded us richly, making it very addictive, it also leads deeply into conflict with one another and our surroundings. By isolating our inner sense of ‘self’ from the ‘otherness’ outside, we inevitably come to fear that otherness. We then either allow ourselves to be dictated to by that otherness as a purely external ‘Authority’, ‘Judge’ or ‘Force’ against which we are powerless, or we attempt to defeat or withdraw from it. So we seek perfection within ourselves, and may view death as terminal ‘punishment’ for ‘sinful’ imperfection and/or believe in ideas like ‘survival of the fittest’. We then struggle to eliminate those ‘gaps’ in our boundaries that make us ‘impure’, susceptible to outside ‘contamination’ - vulnerable. So we wage war on ourselves and nature, creating an ‘Anti-culture’ of ‘one against other’, in which every seeming victory convinces us of our rightness and need to go on winning at all costs.
So, what of the ‘immersed feeling’ of spatial togetherness, which I, along with others, have called ‘inclusionality’ (to contrast with the ‘rationality’ of the detached view). Surely this cannot be realistic? But in fact I think there is every reason, including every scientific reason, to believe it is more realistic than the view coming from detached objectivity. This is because the apparent ‘solidity’ of ‘substance’ and vacant passivity of ‘space’ are illusions. Not for want of trying, we have never found any ‘solid, massy’ atomic particles at the centre of every thing, only distinctive spatial domains. And boundaries that appear as smooth, impenetrable barriers from afar always prove on closer inspection to be variably permeable transitions from one ‘depth’ or region of space to another. The ‘real’ geometry of the Universe is not a static ‘Cartesian box’ of matter distributed through space as discrete particles, but a dynamic ‘nested holeyness’ of space distributed through matter over a vast array of scales.
We need therefore to grow beyond being scared by what Einstein referred to as the ‘frightening ghosts’ of fixed reference frames and absolute time (a product of excluded space), and include ourselves within the dynamic, fluid framing of nature. To some extent this growth is evident in the emergence of relativity, quantum and complexity theory, but even these are held back by a fixed mathematical framework that imposes ‘initial conditions’ (a ‘starting place’) on dynamic processes. So we need to grow yet further.
The growth towards this dynamic framing is accompanied by a feeling of empathic rapport that I can only describe as ‘joy’. And this joy is something we can all feel in our everyday relationships whenever we ‘let ourselves go’ and open up to one another. No longer do we seek perfection within ourselves as independent individuals, but instead comprehend our diverse and changeable forms as expressions of the space we all include and are included by. And this diversity is seen not as a source of differences that conflict, but of differences that complement one another. We embody both light and shadow, and accept death as a vital opening into other space that feeds, rather than is fed, by life. If nothing comes between us, then nothing is what pools us together. We co-create true Peace by aspiring towards dynamic balance, attuning with one another in our common space, loving what once we regarded as our enemy.
Alan Rayner is a Reader in Biology at the University of Bath and author of 'Degrees of Freedom - Living in Dynamic Boundaries'. He wishes to acknowledge the inclusion of many correspondences in the ideas expressed above.