Exploring temporal weaving as a practice: The ancient body, the old culture and the young attention
What if we exist in 3 parallells timelines? The ancient body, the old culture and the flickering attention. This is an exploration of what it would mean if that was a story we could believe.
“What’s our superpower?” “We’re walking around in it.” I said, referring to the body. I think more specifically it could be said that it’s our adaptability that is the human superpower and our bodies, our culture and our attention are part of that. There are certain aspects of that statement that I would like to dig deeper into in this post. I was reading Jung and his writing on the collective unconscious and from that something started to shift. This piece will be a leaning into that shift with the ambition to make it more tangible.
What I read from Jung was this idea that the body is ancient. That got me thinking, what if we exist in 3 timelines simultaneously? The ancient body, the ‘old’ culture and the fluttering present ‘self’ / identity / attention driven body-mind.
Perhaps you want to jump to the conclusions? Then scroll down to “Dancing with it: Temporal weaving as a practice” and then work backwards if it calls you.
The body: A dissipative structure for maximising neg-entropy
I found that to be a fascinating possibility, the 3 temporal realities co-existing in us. There is that quote that’s been bouncing around in me for a long time that still grabs me deeply each time I hear it: “remember that you are the result of a lineage of unbroken heartbeats from the first time life appeared on this planet.” I makes me humble and it invites a long term perspective. The quote is also true. Absolutely, factually true. If any one of those heart beats in your chain had stopped before yours started, you would not exist. It is the reminder of the ancientness of the body. Our precious biological vehicles of transportation or sacks of meat. It is through them we are allowed to discover the world. From a ecological perspective the body is a self organising, self-correcting dissipative structure full of redundancies.
I might take a beat to explain the concept of a dissipative structure. The most common explanation is the water whirl that shows up in your bathtub when you let the water out. It is a temporary structure that appear because the molecules trying to drain out of the bathtub find a temporary stable state in that structure that let them drain faster than in their normal chaotic state. It is dissipative because the water molecules in the structure change all the time as the water drains out, yet the structure is clearly visible and constant. Our bodies are the same. Our cellular material is exchanged every 7 (or so) years and yet if you meet a friend after 10 years you will recognise them. Our bodies are dissipative structures. And they are not our own. They have been passed down through millennia and they do gradually structurally adapt to their environments, just not as fast as other parts of us.
Meditative intermission: If your friend that you hadn’t seen for a decade has none of the same cells that you met last time but you still recognise her, then how does that put you in relationship with for instance your kids or grandkids? Your grandparents and great grand parents? How is it that you can know that their bodies are actually ‘other’ than the one you are currently inhabiting? How is it that you know that your body right now is ‘other' than the world? You are constantly acquiring building blocks, metabolising them and transforming them. That is true for all the bodies around you. So what does that do with this notion that you and your body is separate from all of ‘the rest of it? Those notions are age old but it’s interesting to look at them from this particular perspective.
The other aspect of seeing our bodies as dissipative structures the inertia it implies. These structures appear because they are temporarily more energy efficient than the other alternatives. What if that is exactly what bodies are? What life is? Jeremy Lent describes the concept of neg-entropy in his book The Web of Meaning clearly. The idea of neg-entropy is that the absolutely central thing to these bodies of ours is that they temporarily suspend entropy through life. It’s that bodies are the super complex, most efficient, dissipative structures that nature has come up with so far to suspend or slow the entropy for as long as possible. And this structure is inherited.
If we stack that on top of the bordering pan-psychic or object oriented ontology (OOO) perspective that everything is alive, that Tim Morton describes in the book Hyperobjects, it gets interesting. He speaks of the implications it has to be to exist in different timelines. Or different spacetime-lines. A rock will not take notice of the human since there are so many that will pass by during it’s millennia long lifetime. Therefore there are much fewer inputs worth taking into account. Fewer differences that makes a difference if you will. What warrants attention in that body are inputs that is worth regarding when it comes to the contexts that actually physically shape it. Perhaps that is also true for the body. There is intelligence in that slowness. Like the forced slower decision making that we have constructed ourselves in different parliamentary processes globally. Decisions with larger consequences will have to be agreed upon by a larger share of the majority and over a longer timeline. This is to retain those redundancies and make sure that we are not making fatal errors in our evolution. Perhaps this body of ours afford a similar wisdom. It would work both as a repository of genetic material that will maximise the potential for survival on the species level, it would also try evolutionary strategies in individuals or groups of individuals through cultural shifts to see what works. Gradually, glacially, it could over time allow itself to be changed by its context. By all the trillions of parts agreeing to adapt to what has already been proven to work. This allows us to ‘re-member’ moves and instincts that would otherwise have been lost in this current day and age. Even if some of the moves seem redundant, the signalling might still be valid. Might still be repurposed to fit new contexts.
As you know if you have engaged in ‘self-development work’ negative feelings like fear, stress, anxiety, does not have to come with a negative connotation but rather come with a clear information signal for us to take action, to move or to look at our context and change it. Our ancient bodies carry a structure much older than any living individual or culture. What if that is not a burden as some of the transhuman movements are implying but rather a superpower? It is through this dissipative structure that we can deal with the complexities ahead, if only we would allow ourselves to sink into it. It is the invitation to both connect with Jungs 4 ways of knowing: thinking, sensing, feeling and intuiting but also Verveakes: propositional, perspectival, procedural and participatory. The invitation of the body to get really concrete in, to exist in the material not the potential reality. With a slower cadence. Perhaps its something that allow us to understand our current moment beyond the hype, to truly think and be long term if we would just lean in and become. The body is not digital. It is analogue. And I know that sounds old fashioned but analogue means continuous, no discrete bits of information anywhere to be seen, just fractal stacked processes that gradually build up a synergistic whole (a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts). The body itself is infinitely complex with its trillions of individuals cells coordinating. What can it teach us about a similarly complex world?
Culture: Stable fluctuations and mimetic adaption through our collective consciousness.
Culture and its formation is actually what the Collective Unconscious is about. Or partly about. The culture as a shadow. The water we swim in. Those things that are so natural to us that we never have a need to question them. The micro agreements that make up and steer our world that we never explicitly agreed to but we are rather steeped in from birth and rarely come to question. Similar to how we on the individual level become trapped or shaped by our successful coping strategies - those are actually the behaviours we adapt - it is hard to change something by which dynamics you actually ‘made it’, something that has kept you safe. You can see that argument in R. Quinns book Deep Change, R. Keagans framework Immunity to change (ITC), and you can also see it in a wide array of inquiry and psychological methods. In order to change we as individuals need to see clearly what is keeping us from changing. On the collective level the dynamic is similar but it is so much harder to directly influence.
It’s not only harder to change ones relationship to. Questioning collective truths might put you at a personal disadvantage in questioning them. We think of revolutionaries like Kopernikus as a genius. His genius was confirmed after the fact. How many crazies does it take to make a genius? At what personal cost did the discovery come? Kopernikus paid a high price for questioning the church at the time and was only vindicated after his own death, one could argue that his discoveries and later vindication had very little or no benefit to him at all. It is the same with saints or other chronicled mystic experiences as I heard in a conversation between J. Verveake and C. Stang - what about those that report such ‘out of the ordinary’ or even mystic experiences right now, how do you think of them? Why is their experience or perspective less valued than the chronicled ones found in old books and pergaments, that have been saved for the afterworld to find?
What I’m saying is that culture holds us in a firm grip. Parts that we see and parts that we do not see. Certain things are literally unthinkable as a result of the culture we are brought up. It is mainly when we leave, move away or shift perspectives that we can catch sight of the stories that are holding us. Interestingly this matches well with the latest neurological research on how we ‘get to have’ insights. It seems the key moment of insight typically coincide with a perspective shift. Once you’ve taken the problem in consciously and take a shower, or read about another problem or do the dishes and suddenly you ‘have’ the solution. In the case of culture that might, as mentioned, mean emerging yourself in a different culture. In that dislodging, perspectives might shift. New experiences would render new insight. A trick with culture is to figure out how to re-embed into it without being re-hypnotised by it nor threatened by the potential for that initial disadvantage we spoke of. That goes for leaving or coming home. It’s unlikely you are hailed as the saviour coming with solutions. Unless you say things people would like to hear. Which is rarely the case with transformation processes. If we instead realise that the invitation is to work with it, and in the process of working there might emerge possibilities for new habits or change as some call it.
Culture is tricky. It does not necessarily move in obvious ways. But as far as I can see if you look deeply enough you will find the hermetic principle of correspondence (as above so below) seems to hold also for culture. Gregory Bateson pointed it out very aptly in his identifying the schismogenic process. A process within which we are reflexively and categorically reacting to whatever it is we are seeing ‘out there’ that we do not desired at the moment. Sometimes for good reason but very often it is because it is a belief held by a group of people that we do not, under any circumstances want to identify with. That does not put us in the ‘good’ corner but rather we end up in the other end of a polarity. Still defined completely by the unwilling ox that we are trying to master. It is not until we’ve found ways to calm the ox, ride it home and forget about it that we can begin on the journey of introspection to find out what it actually is that we are longing for ourselves. It might be the point of view of the other people, it might also be the opposite, but most likely our opinion will reside somewhere between the extremes poles of that spectra when we are relaxed and thinking clearly.
So what I am saying is that we have to relate to the body and it’s slowness. Ancientness if you will even. It is not quite on a geological time scale but at least in the 10.000 of thousands of years. The culture is much faster than that, but I think parts of it is slower than we think. Certain cultural trajectories are maintained over centuries, if not even longer. Others swing faster like the reactive swings proposed by Neil Strauss (The fourth turning) in his more cyclical view of history points to. Strauss put culture formation swinging back and forth ca 4 times over each saecculum (80-120 years) due to predictable intergenerational dynamics that manifest in the world. Apart from those pendulums swings, the culture seems to keep a longer trajectory over the time. Influenced more by the infrastructure (tech and otherwise) that we live in. It contains dynamics and drivers that repeat but the gravitational points shift as we are ‘progressing’. Culture is much slower than the individual and at the same times it gives us a way of responding to changing conditions in our context through mimetically adapting new behaviours. To accept what the new dominant group has decided is the ‘fad of the day’ allows us to quickly spread changes in behaviour not genetic but pre-frontal cortex driven, conscious changes to behaviour. The price for not going along is either exclusion or that you have to find a sub-culture that accept your belonging. Culture might eventually lead to actual genetic changes in our bodies, or activation of stored, redundant genome (or potential if you will). But that takes longer. Culture is a way for us to try something out for a while with limited consequences. Or so it was until we started moving towards a global culture. Gone are the nuances and local adaptions, those highly contextual misunderstanding that actually made cultural adaptions feasible in more contexts and instead our culture is commercially driven at a level of abstraction that does not relate to the local context and therefore risk completely destroying the local contexts. Forgetting that we need a material context to keep living as biological beings. Instead of looking at the contents of cultures to deicide wether they are rich or not one could perhaps imagine looking at the number of cultures and the diversity of them? That might be more relevant.
Culture is a incredibly powerful tool but what I perceive as the dominating paradigm of direct manipulation of culture that some cultural designers engage in, is perhaps not the way to go. When we do that the culture might push back. If we instead go for behaviour, those tiny actions every day that our system then becomes made of. What if culture is not so much what we say we do but rather what we actually do? In other words it’s critical that we get to the behavioural layer or we will not be very effective in shifting culture. One way of doing that is moving away from prescription and focus on constraints. But that process requires trust in people. That given the right motivations they will chose wisely. It seems to me that is not where our current system is headed. What we seem to be doing lately is making less room for misinterpretation by making the punch lines very explicit. That is admirable but it will also further alienate those with a different viewpoint and when the dialoge break down we get factions and extremism on both ends of the spectra. This creates more ‘others’ and makes us less effective in our coordination. What I’m saying is: culture is a powerful tool but it’s layered and complex. It operates through stories, retelling of stories and misunderstandings (adaptions) are at the very heart of those. That is how we can contextually adapt culture. There is no such thing as a culture to mould them all but rather we need a multitude of contextual, interconnected cultures that somehow have been interpreted and adapted by people bottom up. Cultures that translates into ‘right action’. Culture has to be shaped by the materiality of the people living it. The brand is not enough. It’s how we live it that actually spells out our culture.
Said in another way, weaving in temporality: this type of design work is not for those who hope to see clear and concise outcomes during their lifetime. Not for the aspiring heroes. It is for those with more patience, faith and compassion than that. Culture is multigenerational. Hence it changes in that timeframe too no matter what it looks like on the ground through the lens of your flickering attention.
The body-mind and it’s flickering attention.
So we are down to the smallest part that I will deal with in this writing on temporality. The self. The me and it’s constituents. If the body has fleeting boundaries and the culture has it’s pace, the me unfolds during our lifetime. The conditions we are born into and the trauma we sustain as we grow up. Our becoming less and less physically dependent on others to at some point start actively acquiring our sovereignty (or perceived such). It is a journey of remembering and metabolising our own contexts in order to perhaps gain some freedom. Paraphrasing my favourite Nora Bateson quote, the surrender to our lack of agency is what gives us the agency. By accepting that everything is inevitable we can start liberating ourselves from the complicated, convoluted workings of our minds. Of course that is a bit of a contrived notion since the latest and greatest of trauma research is pointing to that we have to also deal with our internalised intergenerational trauma in order to start coming into contact with our unfiltered (or perhaps rather filter aware) attention. Befriending the multiple stories (or sub-personalities) we are living and curiously exploring how they serve(d) us and therefore come to be is the work of our lifetime (for most of us).
This puts our attention in a certain time frame. Be it some 70/80 years for most of us around the world. This bodys ageing and demise gives us a certain level of focus. The limited timespan that we have at our disposal gives us motivation to charge ahead. To do something important, perhaps to build something for those that we leave behind or perhaps in order to make ourselves immortal through the contributions we made to society, culture or even the human race. Death is a great thing to push off against in order to let yourself surrender (or for some, fight for) to what is truly important in a more global sense.
This is where the surfing of the different timelines come in to play. The trick, it seems if we look at most wisdom traditions, is to not get caught up in direct action (reacting). The truly great dared thinking freely, beyond their own person. Sticking with doing what seems right in every given moment. In order to get to that level of discernment one has to come to peace with ones own conditioning, i.e. deal with the trauma that is in our system and that we’ve been given through our legacy. A friend of mine that does a lot of work with the deeply traumatised carries the perspective that those with that type of troubled history seem to have a different sensitivity, greater powers than the rest of us if you will. Our path is to turn the exploration of our ordeal into service to something bigger. Most of us will have to detach from the desire to see the outcomes of our labor and find a relationship to our work that gives us pleasure in doing the work itself. That way we are unfolding (developing) while we are in service.
To do that we need to weave the timelines. Keep them clearly in view so that we can live through them (rather than in them) and discern also through that lens. To source wisdom from the ancient body on the topics that are holding our attention. To exercise discernment in the conversation between our ‘selfs’ desire and the cultural layer. Key skills seems to be cultivating our sensing and patience so that we can see when the pendulum swings and then, when the time is right spring into action in full mastery from the practice we’ve engaged in through experimentation. That way we can enact the right move free from hesitation with full access to our primal, instinctive power and exert the biggest influence on the system as a whole. As the swing then moves in another direction we get to rest and recover. Not disconnected just idle, surveying and sensing for the next ‘right moment’. Trusting that we did what needed to be done, letting our actions unfold. Some of us are working on pendulums that are already swinging with lost of speed. Far between pushes but the pushes require everything we’ve got. Others are working hard to get a pendulum to gain some initial momentum. That requires more frequent (perhaps even constant) force, until we start getting the swing to move. Each of these chores will carry different types of rewards. And regardless of which one we are engaging with it is only with the perspective of the 7 generations (going forward and backwards in time) that we can assess the ‘rightness’ of our actions. It means loving that which came before us and allowed us to be acting in this particular way in this particular moment. It also means that we will not be judged by the outcomes that we could not have foreseen but rather by the intention and essence by which we engaged in the activity. Provided that it is combined with a willingness to admit fault and adapt when the outcome of the action did not match the intention, so others paying attention to the same swing can correct accordingly. Yet trusting fully that it is as it had to be at that moment.
In a way it is a deep acceptance of the constant dying we are going through. Dying that change the changes in capabilities we have at different times in our lives. It is physical ageing and maturing but also the spiritual aspects of that process. That also becomes the wisdom of the body-mind that some of us are trying to ignore. Our aging redirects our attention. That process in itself invites us to different perspectives on and ways of service. If we are able to be with what seems to be unfolding with open awareness and curiosity, weaving in as much of the our context into our actions as possible rather than control or directing, we might gain access to a larger, expanded universe. More space-time if you will. But then we have to act when we are called upon. Trying to push the river gets us nowhere. Nor does thinking that we know this particular river, remember that we cannot step into the same one twice. That is the predicament of the attentive mind: it has imaginary access to the vastness of all the timelines (and perhaps beyond) but no way of knowing if this lifetime is one of building capacity or potential or actually one of enacting it. The only way to know is to ground fully in the present moment with trust; remembering the truth that we are all part of one movement.
Dancing with it: Temporal weaving as a practice
So where I’m ending up after having turned this thing around a few laps is this. We have our attention and what we perceive to be our individual life-tasks to deal with. One way or another we have to get through them to effectively get to lean into the longer timelines. Cultivation of our individual selfes that might become cultural if we have to courage to act accordingly in the world. The cultural in turn might become the genetic through the epigenetic mechanism i.e. there is a path for actually reorganising the body itself. If what we engaged in was actually for the good of the human species.
There is nothing fixed there. The materiality is also unfolding, just more slowly. We are looking at different types of dissipative structures with different timescales and inertia. If we can accept that we cannot fulfil our potential then that might be an invitation to what I hear Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger speak of in their 5th EP on the theme of Bend not break (Podcast: The great simplification): “Do what you are good at but care about the whole.” It is what the Agile folks speak about when they remind us that mathematically, any local optimum always comes at a cost for the whole. If you are doing what is best for you, that is probably at someone else’s expense. If you are keeping what is best for you in view and acting in the interest of the whole, the edge of your world, that is going to be a better direction for long term, the regenerative action. The action that increases the size of the cake. The beauty of the attentive mind is that it works on a shorter timescale. In it’s constant shifting and willingness to die we can relearn almost anything. What we derive pleasure from, what we need, who were are, what we enjoy etc. There is nothing fixed about it, regardless of what the current capitalist/economic theory might be telling you.
The temporal is tricky. Not only is time relative, so is it’s perception as well as chronology. The body does not know much of that supposed order of events, when the chemistry moves whatever association we’ve attached to the combination of neurons firing is what is real for us. In this sense the cultivation of none judgement and sensing - learning to deal in the primary, raw, naked emotions is helpful. Instead of anger I might be able to perceive an expansive, red hot emotion that is encouraging me to stand my ground. Instead of fear I might perceive a contracting, greyscale experience that is inviting me to shrink, to listen, to bide my time remaining in place. If I really tap into my body I can feel how my ancestors would have related to it, the imagined lion that is most likely no longer a lion - but it is still figuratively something that I am invited to pay attention to. As a kid the lion is associated with not wanting to be discovered and pensive waiting for it to go away, likely with a strong wish to survive. As a hunter that is the signal for pending action, likely with excitement and potential fame and hero status. Through sensing in this, very open, unclassified way I might even be able to curiously and openly study my culture. Some imaginative extrapolation based on what the emotion seems to want me to enact might let me connect with past generations of future ones. As will a more intense study of language and grammar and their contextual shifts allow me to intuit the direction of the shifting culture. All of these are clues to the teleology of my current experience. For me, starting to piece that together, has been important steps towards that increased ability to remain in service.
Current neuroscience point to the mystery of the creation of a new idea. It seems to be happen in that space of time we are not looking, or aren’t able to look actually, specifically because we are looking away. In the space between. In the perspective shift. Weaving Jungs different ways of knowing (thinking, intuition, feeling, sensing) as well as Verveakes (participatory, perspectival, procedural and propositional) seems to give a hint on how we could understand this in our pursuit of insight. Task shifting. Perhaps that is not the detrimental practice that its been made out to be (and this is pure speculation). What if the invitation to task shift with such high frequency is actually a cultivation of the skill of lateral thinking? We still need to cultivate the power of concentration and our attention but shifting between the haptic, the cognitive, the embodied and the relational ways of dancing with a topic might actually be a skill we can develop. An unspecific attention allowing us to follow several seemingly separate threads in the weave towards similar ends. Combining that with a reduced focus on the first order effects from my action but to squint my eyes and keep a lookout for second, third or fourth order effects of the movements I’m engaging in. You know five butterflies in the forrest will flap their wings much more than one neatly pinned in your collectors book. Think of the implications of those butterflies’ wing flaps through the lens of chaos theory. Five butterflies increases the probability of that so needed storm manyfold. Perhaps it’s time to let direct action take the back seat to all the other potential you have in you and find how you cultivate your mastery in such a way that when the swing comes your way you are ready to push it with all your skill, power and commitment you’ve got. Cultivation like that cannot be theoretical it will have to contain elements of experiment and experience. But with that push, the right push on the right swing, you stay in service to it. Follow its trajectory, waiting for another impulse to spring into action. Listening openly to the information your senses are conveying. Trusting fully that whatever you did was all you could have done at that moment.
Tying a temporary knot on this particular package
The body is ancient. It’s not a thing it’s a dissipative structure. Full of movement. Constantly interrelating, metabolising and regenerating. It spans the millennia. The culture is old. It spans generations and it shifts treacherously, unconsciously unless we look at it with our outmost attention. It is the water we swim in. It is what it had to be to make sure most of us survived. The ‘self’ is fickle. Quick to die to itself. Far from the stable preferences of the constructed ‘homo economicus’. Constantly changing, optimised for belonging, and with that condition fulfilled its longing for authentic expression.
I’ve explored the weaving between these aspects in this piece. How the body and it’s shape is the given that shapes how we explore, discover and create our world. This optimised, dissipative structure focused on minimal entropy recreates our cultures. It enacts what is seemingly leading to the best possible outcomes for the collective. And that in turn deeply influences the solution space available to our own individual ‘selves’. Yet at the same time the self in it’s fickleness allows us to up regulate certain traits, to adapt to that which will increase our own individual survival according to a small number of fundamental principles. This creates subcultures that might create cultures. The traits that are prioritised there become encoded in our bodies through epigenetics. Not cancelling out but rather turning on that which is adaptive. And over time our bodies might change. According to a small set of fundamental principles. It’s top down and bottom up.
The implications of this perspective is to learn how to dance between the different ways of knowing. To sense, think, intuit and feel not through language but acquiring information through direct, primary sensory experience sparked by play, aware of the different timelines that the different information would imply. Perhaps that is one important step towards that which could feel like freedom?
Timing timing