A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Application and Practical exercises

13 : Specific applications: 4. Settling deeper into the Living world

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So far I have described ways in which these techniques may help remediate things "that have gone wrong". Overwhelm generates an often invisible low-level of dissociation and loss of connection, and loss of connection creates a greater propensity to be overwhelmed in ways we do not realise. Growing up in a human-constricted environment - carpets, furniture, buildings, clothes, books, toys, plates and cutlery, and more recently electrical and electronic technological gadgets (lights, radio, TV, internet, etc.) means that we learn the rules by which the human constructed world behaves better than the rules by which the living world behaves. The human-comnstructed world is not relational other than by whatever imagination we might invest in it (such as toys, teddy bears, tool-using, etc), and so there is from the very beginning an intrinsic expectation that the non-human world will not be relational, except by force of imagination. And the world is stripped of a vast ocean of relationality that would otherwise be our life-long companionship.

Of course, the (potential) truth is very different, but the degree to which is is different (and fully relational) is only known by (primarily first peoples) cultures that have retained relationality with and a while-hearted sense of being embedded within the living-ness of the living world. The myth of the human-constructed world is that experience may be derived equally second-hand from books and ideas. Whereas in reality - is something is not deiectly experienced, our imagination may never actually comprehend it - only the phantasm of empathy that arises in the imagination. Anyone who has learned a craft - such as carpentry or stone carving or music or dance - knows that (a) the theory might be useful but in the end it's all about experience, and (b) experience may sometimes be grokked / absorbed by osmosis by simply being in the presence of someone who has some degree of mastery of that craft.

So the first step towards regaining a participatory relationality to the living world is to reduce the degree of society-induced numbness. This is not a trivial task, because (1) you don't know what you are going towards until you arrive, and (2) decreased numbness may increase awareness of the underlying overwhelm that caused it in the first place. The structure I have put down here gets round these two issues quite elegantly, and I talk a little about this vast topic in the audio track (below).