Counting Game
If we are trained to believe that numbers must be abstract, the idea of different ways of counting remains an eclectic subject for mathematical conjecture. Moderns do not believe in ‘ways of counting’. They ‘know how to count’ and thus the matter is laid to rest.
We seem to have overlooked the fact that mathematics originated in cultures which experienced and employed numeric entities as inherently meaningful vessels of connotation; transports to a deeper intimacy with pattern, identity and relationship.
These imaginary underpinnings inform the basis of our representational intelligence, and comprise crucial assets involved in assembling our experiences of identity and relation. When damaged by enforced abstraction, the results are crippling to our imagination and intelligence.
So, as it turns out, we need a better way to understand numerism, particularly as it informs ideas like what separation and unity mean. The ones we learned were unreasonably divested of a variety of crucial features. Thankfully, the remedy lies near at hand; in a way of understanding the relationship between our hands, our bodies, and relation in general.
[" . ~ o ~ . <&
Children are taught to count in different ways according to the traditions of the cultures and families they arise within. Some of these ways are largely or purely abstract. Others have links to songs or stories whose content may appear merely fanciful or silly to outsiders — particularly those who do not understand how profoundly imagination and creativity partake in the process of eliciting or expressing intelligence of any kind at all.
Many modern educational authorities frown on the idea that numbers could be intrinsically meaningful (whether or not this meaning is stipulated), in part because there are no ‘objective anchors’ for such ideas. They therefore demand that we limit our understanding to the formalities of numeric identification and manipulation, which are essentially mechanical in nature and devoid of meaning.
In a bizarre inversion of science’s skepticism, many new-age cults have co-opted older systems of understanding such as those commonly associated with numerology. This is dangerous for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the systems in question are taken out of context and converted to dogma deployed in a bid to further the development of cults of idea or personality1.
Both of these approaches have undesirable consequences; but some of these inhibit or interfere with developmental opportunities so astonishing that they must be witnessed to be understood.
#! . ~ o ~ . ~~
What I want to explore together is a topic tangential but related to numerological metaphor: the idea that the way we learn to count influences how we assemble and understand crucial aspects of identity, separation, connection, and unity.
The way we are taught to think about numerism informs our basic understanding of what separateness means, and this idea is woven into the foundations of the entire library of our languages, knowledge and methods. If our idea of what separation ‘means’ is even slightly misfounded, the errors will propagate throughout the bases of our knowledge and systems to such a degree as to nearly cast our minds in their image.
Conversely, if we can form models and ideas which are in basis more like the truth (and ourselves) — these relatively advanced perspectives recast our relationship with intelligence in the image of the self-advancing flow that is creativity and learning. Such perspectives are dynamic and adaptive. They tend to seek their own progressive transformation rather than defending (or replicating) the outcomes of prior development. The resulting intelligence takes on the character of liquid prodigy rather than the static likeness of ‘definitions’.
Because of their ability to inflect the meaning of ideas such as ‘one’, ‘individual’, ‘group’ and ‘relationship’, models that communicate to us about the basis of numerism and what numbers mean are involved in generating the foundations of our representational intelligence; their character functions to metaphorically catalyze (or inhibit) important aspects of our representational and our relational awareness.
As our own bodies are recursive, we need a method that includes this in a way children can easily understand. As they are connective in many domains at once, we need a way to highlight these connectivities. Any appropriate model should also form a simple introduction to what I will call the scalar expressions of relative orders.
A method that conveys an embodied experience of these matters is more like us than an abstract method, and our capacity to learn benefits in general from this kind of self-likeness. The one we will explore emphasizes a paradigm of structural relation present in our own bodies as well as the other organisms within and around us.
(` . ~ o ~ . {^
under-st(ar)-(h)anding...
Although we do not usually think deeply of the question ‘what does one mean?’ — we carry its structure as one of the most fundamental substrates from which we assemble meaning and identity. This numeric substrate is also fundamental to every evaluation we may perform.
Unfortunately we were told what it means, and what we were told was a lie. We cannot allow a treasure so valuable to be obscured by ideas — we must go, in person, and retrieve it from the prisons of empty abstraction assembled by authority.
Our goal is not an answer but instead a way of seeing which describes a way of traveling. A model that simultaneously demonstrates the dynamic emergence of the one from the many while preserving and highlighting the unique character of any ‘individual’ we may distinguish.
It’s no coincidence that the features and numerism of our own human hand and its relationship to our body are perfectly suited for this necessity.
All of our senses and extensions are miraculous, but the hands hold a special place amongst them. I am skillfully agitating mine in rhythmic riffs of tapping to produce this material. Beyond the physical transport our feet and legs provide, our hands are the part of our body that most commonly executes our intentions in the world of matter.
The relationship between our hands and minds is bidirectional. Like horse and rider, they pull each other onward into new skills and opportunities, each one exerting a kind of developmental gravity on the other when they are engaged. They ‘grow each other’.
Having hands changes the kinds of minds we develop, and what we do with them changes our brains, our minds, and the range of developmental opportunities we will have access to. The acquisition and development of skills involving mental and digital manipulation transforms our relational capacities in every dimension of our experience.
The relationship between hands, awareness and consciousness is ancient, deep, and inconceivably rich with meaningful histories. But here’s an example which I find particularly compelling: your hands possess the startling distinction of being the one part of you which you almost always see, directly, every time you do almost anything.
Open something? You see your hand(s). Close something? You see your hand(s). Lock something? You see your hand(s). Retrieve something? You see your hand(s). Manipulate something? Ysyh. Throw something away? Ysyh. Type or write? Ysyh. Play an instrument? Ysyh. Call a friend? Ysyh. Answer a phone? Ysyh. Caress your loved one? Ysyh. Steer a vehicle? Ysyh. Ride an animal? Ysyh.
Every piece of music you have heard was created with hands. Almost every art object, every blueprint, every book — every human home — all made by the skillful employment of human hands.
Could it be that the these hands have their own intelligence? That, almost like intelligent pets, their intelligence and character leaps into all that we make with them? The truth is more, not less, than this.
To catalyze lucidity in dreaming some modern traditions recommend looking at your hands. How long will it take to occur to us that something deeply similar (and vastly more profound) is available while awake?
The key involves a way of understanding our hands and their relationship to our bodies that is also an unimaginable invitation to an amazing kind of travel…
)) . ~ o ~ . |+
Now stop and think a moment. If you had celestial parents who adored you, and they wanted to hide a crucial secret about your own nature (or perhaps the actual route to your home) in plain sight, where would they put it?
Not in a book, for not every child will read or find it. Not in a drug, for the same reason. Not in a specific idea, or food, or experience that only certain people can have — not in one peculiar dance or language. Not in a rock or a kind of metal. They would put it someplace so essential that it could not be missed or lost or even very easily obscured.
Somewhere that is nearly always where you are looking.
If someone important wanted to hide a secret in plain sight, what better place than the extension of your body that is almost constantly within your field of vision — and just as constantly overlooked.
&# . ~ o ~ . +?
Counting Ways
Although many sophisticated methods of body-based counting and calculating are conserved in indigenous cultures throughout the world, few if any any flourish in modern cultures, and it seems unlikely that any exist amongst modern adults. Perhaps we can begin to change that now.
The numeric paradigm that informs modern academic and scientific pursuits demands abstraction: it insists we discard any idea of value beyond those stipulated for quantities and evaluations. It is aggressive and self-promoting. Historically, it usually replaces traditional systems in cultures exposed to it. This process involves stripping away dimensions of meaning from numbers and numerism and divesting them of their original anchors in our bodies and lived experiences of relation.
While it is true that the the 10 in 10 coins has no demonstrable necessity of containing or conveying extra dimensions of information in order to function within the confines of accounting, it is not true or sufficient for anyone with a creative relationship to language, counting, experience, or knowledge. And that should be all of us.
For the purpose of counting coins — or the dead of war — or computing elaborate equations in physics and geometries — the abstract paradigm is sufficient to the task. But our own initial experiences of numerism were unencumbered by human knowledge systems and their peculiar purposes and biases — they happened with our own hands and feet, with the faces of others and plants and creatures all around us, long before the idea of formal accounting was even possible to our minds. And before we arrived, they emerged from the lived experience of human beings relating with a living world, and this experience was one of awe, wonder, connectedness, fear, confusion, dreaming and mystery. In the experience of our ancestors (as in our own as children) basic paradigms of numerism and counting took on many different dimensions of meaning simultaneously.
Many vital avenues of our relations with numbers lie beyond the purview of mathematics, science, or accounting — yet the methods we are brought up to believe take over the transports of these experiences and replace their diverse branches with a single domineering definition. Some of these ‘lost roads’ are crucial to the underpinnings of our intelligence, and when they are damaged by having our experiences of numerism stripped of meaningful significance, we suffer egregious impediments to the development of our minds and cultures.
To restore our living relationship with numbers and numerism, we can take advantage of a way of understanding unity and distinction which is wonderfully exemplified in our own bodies.
Many modern human cultures teach hand-counting as an introduction to numerism for young children, and I suspect that many of skyBook’s readers learned to count on their hands. The simple method popularized in the West results in a count of 5. I wish to expand dramatically upon this method.
Follow me for a moment, as if we were small, again together, exploring a mystery so deep and so secret that no adult could ever fathom it…
)@ . ~ o ~ . ?<
Unsided
To begin, examine your (left) hand.
From above you see the outside; the thumb points to the right. On the outside, although there are many small lines all over it, it is generally rough (compared to the inside) and there are few if any obvious lines of division. The outside appears as a unity, and most of the little lines are either vague or in bunches. In this sense, the outside can be understood as representing unity.
Now turn it over.
Seen from above on the inside, the thumb points to the left. The surface is generally smooth (compared to the outside), and rather obvious divisions appear, particularly where the members join the palm, and at the joints. The inside appears as a set of distinctions or divisions. In this sense, the inside can be understood as representing distinction.
Let us then take the outside of the hand as representative of unity, and the inside of distinction. Around the outer edges of the hand these paradigms blend.
They are not in conflict; both sides are necessary to have a hand at all.
)@ . ~ o ~ . ?<
(The Keys are) In Your Hand
We are already familiar with the count of ‘5 fingers’. I’ll call this ‘the human count’ since most modern humans agree that it’s a reasonable way to count. It doesn’t matter which side we count, since to all appearances they both count the same. If someone holds up their hand (usually palm toward the viewer) and asks ‘how many’ I suspect almost every modern would say 5.
So the human count essentially asks us to count the extensions as ‘fingers’, and the result is 5, and that’s pretty much ‘the end of it’.
The Human’s Count: 5
The Principle: Count the members as separate entities.
Now let us proceed by extension to establish a more useful and intelligent system.
The second method I will call ‘the animal count’, since, although most animals don’t use formal numerism at all, if they did, they might remember a few things the humans have forgotten in their rush toward objective abstraction.
To understand the animal count, examine the inside of the hand. The method conserves a crucial principle which the humans have discarded; it’s useful to count the most important aspect first, since the (perceived) nature and character of the most important or central element inflects the (perceived) nature and character of its extensions. Counting it first emphasizes its importance in our memories. And the most important element is the one that unifies all the others.
Here’s how the animal count works:
1 for the unifying body (the palm).
1 for the thinking member (the thumb).
1 for each working member (4 fingers).
The Animal’s Count: 6
The Principles: Count in order of importance. Distinguish the unique member.
The animal count remedies the human count’s dismissal of the unifying body. This is no minor omission, for as anyone knows, what is not counted is not seen — in common parlance ‘it doesn’t count’. By discarding the unifying body, a false separation is imposed on the members, and the idea of their unified source is either discarded or deauthorized by subtle implication. This loss is catastrophic as it pertains to how we assemble and understand the meaning of and relationship between unity and separation. When ramified in human minds and cultures, the results of this ‘minor’ omission are disastrous.
Additionally, the animal count acknowledges the unique role of the thumb, ordinarily discarded in the human count of 5. The thumb is the unifying member — the member whose character and function unifies the working members by opposing them. Ignoring these matters distorts the paradigm of which the hand is an instance. And this leaves a broken image at the core of our relational perspectives and intelligence. An image in whose likeness we cannot and should not be rendered…
An animal might think of the wrist as a ‘tail’. To a tree, it might be a stem.
&# . ~ o ~ . =\
The next extension I will call the ‘angel’s count’, as it represents a superposition of the previous ideas. We would hope that an angel would be able to lift us above our common understandings, unifying all domains, while adding something divine to the equation.
The angel’s count preserves the principle of the animal’s count: Count in order of importance — but the angel’s perspective is a bit more expansive. It begins on the outside of the hand, and counts the hand itself as a unity. First, and most importantly, your hand is one. A unity. The angel then turns the hand over and proceeds as the animal does; adding a crucial outbound link without which we would be left with a hand ‘too separated’ to be real. Here’s how the angel’s count works:
1 for hand as a unity.
1 for the unifying body or palm.
1 for the thinking member or thumb.
1 for each working member or finger.
+ for the upscale link (the wrist).
The Angel’s Count: 7+
The Principles: Count in order of importance. Acknowledge the precedence of the unity. Acknowledge the the unifying body. Distinguish the unique member. Highlight the upscale transition.
The angel adds an asterisk — a symbolic reminder that the hand is an instance of a broader unity — connected via the wrist. The angel’s count is 7+, with the plus representing the wrist — the connective element leading (upscale) to the next order which the hand is an instance, member and expression of.
/. . ~ o ~ . <\
The whole is the marriage of generality and specificity; the unity and its members.
The unifying body is the place of emergence, and from it one unique member emerges to ‘oppose’ 4 working members.
The fingers represent the working members, and the thumb the thinking (or unifying) member. Their number, character and relationship grant the hand its extraordinary range of utility and dexterity.
Although the hand does not extend the body in a new specific physical dimension, it does extend the body into a vast plethora of relational capacities, which can be understood as a set of otherwise inaccessible dimensions of activity, development and sensing-relation. In this sense, the hand is an extraordinary extension of the body into otherwise inaccessible dimensions.
The wrist connects the unifying body of hand to that which it extends (the body). It comprises a gap and a bridge — represented in our model by a + symbol. We can understand it as a transport of bidirectional flow in (at least) 3+ connective domains: physical, energetic, and relational (lineage). Finally, it unifies and transcends these distinctions, acting as a gateway to a new order of instancing.
The physical connection — bones and tissues — unifies it with the physical body. The energetic connection has aspects such as blood and sensing (via the nervous system). These flow bidirectionally — to and from the hand.The lineage/relational connection connects our bodies and our hands it to a variety of sources and relationships — the most obvious being the physical evolution of life on Earth. A more subtle connection leads deep into the foundations of human language, all of which bears the signature of our hands.
The angel’s count employs the plus symbol as a visual metaphor of extension itself, and of these three domains: the horizontal line (physical), the vertical line (energy) and their intersection (lineage/relation). The surrounding space can be taken as representing context.
But it also represents the possibility of following the wrist in order to travel upscale to the next order of instancing (which contains and unifies all possible directions of the wrist’s ordinary and nonordinary extensions within the previous order).
In this sense it stands for extension into new orders.
A gap, and a bridge.
`% . ~ o ~ . %^
objectIons and refutatIons
Though some find these distinctions farcical or claim they are arbitrary, approaches that insist we discard our imaginations and their creative participation in sensing and understanding are far more arbitrary and farcical than those which conserve or nurture these assets. What we are left with in the wake of their dismissal is not only uninhabitable but dangerously incomplete.
In light of this I suggest that we must purposefully preserve (or restore) dimensions of meaning-relation which invite these forms of understanding in part because they support the ‘fertilizing’ effects of the dreaming mind and the imagination upon learning and awareness.
These inclusions incline us to more deeply activate our creative intelligence with the result that we become more intimately involved in our experiences of assembling identity, comparison, and evaluation. When we engage a problem or question these extra dimensions of meaning become catalytic assets that involve themselves in nonordinary ways, adding momentum and new angles of approach; enriching our creative integration with experience by supplying novel methods of assembling awareness of the circumstances and variables at play. The result is broader access to creative prodigy — and this matters in nearly every movement of our minds, waking and non.
Within our common cognitive experience, these ‘imaginary domains of meaning’ act as bastions of metaphoric genesis and catalyze the developmental intelligence of the old and young alike. Without them, our relationship with numbers becomes too flat to inhabit and inspires a similar deflation in our own relationships with our minds, our reason, and our relational opportunities.
Numerism cannot be fundamentally abstract because human knowledge and ways of knowing emerge only from embodied human experience. To become abstract, these ways of knowing must be intentionally stripped of their otherwise inherent domains of connotation, metaphoric catalysis and quasi-arbitrary expressions of symmetry which are hallmarks of human cognitive and relational experience.
In our agreement to restore numerism’s inherent dimensions of embodied meaning, we begin the process of transforming the circumcision that our original ‘education’ too often comprises, and by using our own bodies as the model, we ground this antidote irrevocably in ourselves as living expressions of our universe.
We are not ‘observers’.
`% . ~ o ~ . %^
(the wrist+) : The Body
Every sphere has a tail; a place where it was broken off from the great mystery, and this place, like an esoteric radio, is in constant communication with its (reversed) twin ‘across the great divide’. The unity they comprise is made somehow more intimate by the apparent physical separation between them. Your belly-button is thus.
The angel’s count highlights the wrist, a bidirectional order-crossing transport that both separates and joins the hand and the body. In recognizing the significance of the wrist we begin to understand the presence of scalarity as expressed in our hands and forms (and nearly everywhere else our gaze may fall)2. This initially representational understanding catalyzes a much broader experience of comprehension for which it acts as a trigger.
The wrist distinguishes two orders of the general paradigm of which our hand and bodies are physical examples-at-scale. In crossing it in either direction our sensory capacities are expanded (or focused) so that each side of the wrist should be understood to extend the sensitivity and developmental impetus of the other.
On the handside of the wrist, amazing capacities emerge from the focus provided by the structure and relationship of the members (and linkages) of the hand (and its relationship to the body/mind). With it, we feel with profound sensitivity, grasp and manipulate, receive or repulse, and even communicate using gestures and the formation of flowing shapes moving and changing in rhythmic patterns. All of these powers are miraculous; the human hand is the signal achievement of animalian physical evolution, granting abilities too broad to be catalogued.
But ‘across the wrist’ — on the bodyside — there are expanded senses and abilities one could never possibly extrapolate from those available in and as the hand. Across the wrist we have eyes. And a mind. Across the wrist we find a veritable paradise of new dimensions of sensing, participation, manipulation and relation.
Seeing. Smell. Taste. Hearing. Intuition. Comprehension. Imagination. Speech. Evaluation. And all the ways in which they combine and inform each other. So we may understand that ‘across the wrist’ we will invariably find almost impossibly miraculous expansions of the capacities and senses instanced ‘downscale’.
From the hand, the wrist leads upscale — to the next instance of this way of instancing a a living universe which is also a way of counting: the body.
Pause for a moment to reflect on how dramatically the existence of your hands shapes and extends the senses that lie ‘upscale’ from them…
:< . ~ o ~ . |{
Your head has 7 portals. The one that speaks aloud, eats. You’re wrapped around a tube that coils and transforms within you to emerge behind your genitalia. In your gut you contain a biocognitive linear accelerator. When it synchronizes with your brain it creates a ladder that crosses the scales between the orders of intelligence that we are an expression of. This invisible ‘connective transport’ is the ‘wrist’ of the [redacted] that your body is the hand-like extension (into timeSpace) of. It connects to the gut, within the torso — the unifying body.
First, you are one. Your unity has precedence over all possible distinctions. You are yourself. Whole. Just as your hand is.
Like your hand, you have one unifying body3.
Like your hand, you have 4 working members, and 1 thinking member.
Like your hand, the thinking member has 2 major sections (neck and head). It opposes your working members transphysically, in the domain of imaging-unification or consciousness.
Like your hand, your working members each have three major sections — which end in star-shaped appendages sporting unique sensing and manipulation capacities. The feet are primarily involved in manipulating the relationship between the ground and the body, and the hands between the mind and the world.
Your count is the same as your hand’s: 7+
At the scale of your body, the final extensions of the working members are recursively ramified bodies (star-shapes). It is as if someone took the paradigm of the body and reflected it back upon itself, in two similar but unique ways to produce the the hands and feet. These are instances of your embodiment, not parts. Instances-at-scale.
And the wrist is the gap we cross to move between these orders. It’s like an invisible line distinguishing and joining them.
Your head has 7 openings; six of them are bilateral duplicates — one is unique. We could go so far as to say that the eyes are the hands which feel light and reflect (manipulate) light and the nose is a set of feet that walk upon the subtle surfaces of the air and everything within it.
Selah.
You are the hand of some[oneWhichWhereWhenHowWhyWho]…so amazing that we do not have any word-classes that contain its likeness.
(` . ~ o ~ . {^
The Body : (2nd wrist+)
Every human family is a bit like a hand extending itself into a distributed body linked by lineage and intimate relation; it forms a dynamic whole which is an experiment in unifying the unique character and capacities of each member.
This ‘distributed body’ has a ‘wrist’ leading in a variety of directions, but one of these is transhuman, ‘spiritual’, transdimensional — or just plain astonishing. When the human family is unified and in agreement, its wrist becomes a transport of learning, fellowship, awe, and the capacity to rise beyond any ordinary limit or boundary into relational and developmental terrains otherwise inaccessible.
When humans link to each other and their environments in ways that are more like what we are and can become, we experience superfunction. And regardless of appearances every human person and family is a way of reaching for this.
It is if the universe itself is instancing a superHand made of us; creatures with hands and minds — in the hope that we will underst(h)and the nature of the signals calling to us… from across the second wrist.
Every unity has an link which connects it to more broadly established bodies of instancing in multiple ‘directions’ simultaneously. Your body is an example of a broader body of instancing4 of your hand. In this sense we could say the body is a superposition of the hand. Beyond the body the linkage is no longer obviously physical, but is nonetheless real.
Out beyond the unity a person comprises the superpositions don’t look much like a person, or a hand, and most of them don’t look like anything we can easily imagine. One of the superpositions of any given insect would be ‘all moments of insect-experience’. This is not an easy thing to represent or put in a box. We don’t yet have language that allows us to easily or clearly refer to such matters in English, because there is no extant way of knowing that can unify enough domains to attempt it. But we can find more familiar examples.
A good example of one direction of superposition lying ‘outbound’ or ‘upscale’ from a human being is their human family. A family can be understood as a hand slowly developing itself into a (physically and temporally) distributed body whose members are linked by intimate relation and lineage. The unifying person(s) and principle(s) roughly correspond to the unifying body. Each of the members can be a working member, a thinking member, or even a unifying body. Some members may even accept the role of the wrist. Not all instances of the family fulfill this schema in the same way or with similar result — each one is a family, but which directions this develops in will vary widely.
The result is self-extending whole which prospers by the skillful and creative sensing, development, empowerment, and direction of its members. This acts as a bidirectional developmental catalyst. The unique needs and contributions of each member diversify the relational and role experience of the other members and the whole which establishes a space to expand into along the axis of mutuality. Each member is uniquely associated with this axis — a ‘wrist’ — connecting them to the accessible superposition we call a ‘family’. The wrist conducts flow bidirectionally, and is involved with facilitating any modulations in rate, compression (simplification), or expansion (elaboration) that the flow may require.
Experiences of expanding into mutuality and ‘returning’ to individuality form elements in a feedback cycle informing the developmental experience of each ‘individual’ member and the family as a body of unity. But the experience is vastly more rich and profound than these reductive descriptions can imply: the family and each member in it is initially experienced as a habitable instance of personal transpresence. Only later can this be (rather tragically) abstracted to an individual other in the case of members or a conceptual definition in the case of the unity.
When you act or feel or think more as a member of your family (or another group-unity) than an individual — you are experiencing a movement toward or into the second wrist. In ‘crossing the wrist’ in this direction, you exist ‘more as the family aspect’5 of yourself than as the individual.
Most of us (learn to) long for experiences of crossing these kinds of junctures into broader and more unified experiences of role, identity, opportunity and distinction. The word love clearly evokes this ideal, and the profound feelings of intimate care and joyful copresence we feel with those we are close to are measures of the ecstatic experience of being drawn from individuality into unity — across the wrist. Unfortunately, many self-interested cultural agents (and institutions) can parlay this desire into profoundly undesirable embodiments such as armies or corporations. Sports teams are clear examples of the public demonstration of precisely this phenomenon.
At its own position in the ladder of orders, a family will have a wrist that leads into a community. A community into a district, and onwards, to a nation, a planet. These connections differ widely in depth and function. Some may be largely nominal, matters of labels. Others are intimately bound with each person within the family’s life. The final local superposition in this direction is ‘humanity’, the sum of all families and members.
But there are many accessible positions vastly beyond that…
@~ . ~ o ~ .`^
What one encounters when “crossing the wrist’ is partly dependant upon your purpose and the directions (you can take more than one at once) you select. Some of these directions are ordinary in that we can easily conceive of the assemblies that exist across them as distributed unities, networks or something similar. Others are nonordinary, and are challenging to represent or discuss in common language.
In the physical direction, you take in liquid nutrients and gasses, and you emit transformed nutrients, liquids and gasses. Both of these contain bacteria as a part of the intake and output. Those that you emit differ from those you take in. You also take in light, and transform it through reflection and (seemingly modest) bioemission of photons. You cast shadows. Of course, all of your physical interactions with the world and universe are examples of this general direction.
In the relational direction, you connect with all sorts of beings, moments and circumstances, from your family and those who speak your language, to the set of organisms you’ve ingested. Your thoughts, feelings, conversations — you concerns — all of these are evidence of moving amongst linked memories and evaluations, feelings and expectations. In one relational direction you could find the superposition ‘those people I like and remember’ and from there to ‘those people I’ve encountered’ and onward to ‘all people’. Environments, animals and plants play crucial if largely forgotten roles in our relational wrist, because we are instances of the superpositions ‘planet’, ‘organism’ and ‘animal’.
In the lineage direction you represent the living instance of all possible ancestors and progeny — and those beings and circumstances and environments they were relating with. You carry genes as physical tokens of some of these relationships, but outside of you, in the environment and its own superpositions, there are more kinds of memory than we can easily imagine or catalog, and we participate in all of it, directly. There are steps between the orders, just as in all other ladders, for example: Self < Parents (families) < Grandparents (families).
These ‘directions’ represent unique ways of limiting our perspective on what the wrist connects us to and how the transport exists. But in fact, the wrist has no divisions. It carries all outbound and inbound connectivities. And thus, you can follow the wrist itself in an attempt to discover what it is that we and, by proxy this wrist are ‘all about’.
And it is this particular ‘direction’ of exploration that is most astonishing, for in this direction lie superpositions of understanding, memory, learning, and sensing that are far beyond the sum of our fictions and dreams — as intimate aspects of our own being which remain undiscovered primarily because the shape of our stories about identity obscures them.
*% . ~ o ~ . "'
The point at the core is an instance of all positions upon the enclosing sphere’s circumference…
+upStairs
I am the hand of something astonishing. My invisible wrist leads to a position of unity beyond those imaginable here, and I am made to travel ‘across the wrist’ and understand both aspects of my being. More simply: such travel is crucial to our development and survival and is part of what is happening when we dream.
One way to understand ourselves is as the exploratory appendage (within timeSpace) of a being (outside of timeSpace) so shockingly profound that it produces (and inheres within) the diverse organisms of living worlds as expressions of itself — somewhat analogous to the way we produce hairs or a tree produces leaves.
Across the gap that connects you to that what you are an expression of, you exist as miraculous integrations of prodigy beyond anything words can convey. Though you are probably unaware of it, you participate in epic adventures so breathtaking and provocative that the sum of human fictions seems flat in comparison. This is true of you no matter how ordinary your human life may be — for to be human at all is to be thus. But to understand this consciously is difficult without a direct experience of it. That experience occurs when we travel between orders — or cross the second wrist.
Each time you advance along the wrist you ascend an order of instancing, and each of these ‘steps’ reveals catastrophically profound new depth, and richness and relation. Particularly, things and beings that previously appeared absolutely distinct are revealed as obvious unities.
You’re not so much ‘a part of the universe’, as you are an instance of it — a living extension (at scale) formed in all ways in its general likeness — an organismal subposition of all of timeSpace which is learning itself as you (within itself). This situation is a learning-way. Just as the development of manual skills broadens the mind and relational opportunities of the person involved, so too the relationship between a human life and the superposition we comprise ‘the timeSpace hand’ of. The ceaseless intimate exchange of learning-sensing flow between these orders profoundly informs both aspects as they draw each other onward in a never-ending contest of mutual inspiration, growth and development.
As sophisticated instances of a living planet, our existence ‘educates’ superpositions by drawing them into new developmental relationships as the challenges and sensations of our seemingly ordinary human lives feed into their experience. They modulate in response to this ‘sensing’ and these changes feed back into our order as as directions of evolutionary development, inspiration, learning, new relational capacities and regenerative processes.
Move your imagination upscale to the order of the planet, and the living beings of Earth appear as a unified biocognitive hyperstructure, a superorganism. This is your own body at this scale, in this direction. From this perspective, each individual organism takes on the role of a sensory-relational-development appendage belonging to a vastly distributed unity6. But we are not properly distinct from this unity; we are copresent with(in) it, and all of the orders that it proceeds from.
It is ironic that throughout our lives this ‘extended self’ is trying desperately to establish contact with us as human beings — and wants to contact human and inform cultures through us. But the process is a bit like an infant’s attempt to direct its own hands, but in this case the infant exists in a multiplicity of other dimensions at once, and we are culturally-driven creatures in a physical universe. The process is clumsy, slow, confusing to us (because it conflicts with every human culture), and fraught with perils of great variety.
When we ourselves are infants, we are aware of this process and respond to it naturally. As we encounter modern human cultures, the basic elements of our waking experience become defined to us in ways that severely obstruct, damage, or obscure this relationship. We begin to redirect its flows before we are conscious of their existence in us.
Eventually, most of us become hands with an unmatched wrist, so to speak. We are vaguely aware that something is wrong, something is missing, but we cannot imagine exactly what it might be.
And from here, we become prey for every agent that might benefit from misdirecting this sense by mimicking the other end of the wrist…
+- . ~ o ~ . ?<
!wrist
Within this connectionist perspective with its intangible linkages leading off in myriads of directions, connecting us to every kind of relationship and process, a person becomes a swarming nexus of links. Many of these lead into human culture — which is a strange kind of thing in itself as it exists somehow more between us than within any specific place or container. It is like a peculiar game which once begun starts to exist in its own right, acquiring terrain within us and our relationships. It slowly sheds its informality as it gains purchase on human minds and action. Finally, it crystallizes and becomes self-concerned — its bindings on our lives are made real. We must then compete with it for the right to exist and the resources necessary to remain alive.
Perhaps we could say culture is ‘contained’ in the habits and forms common to social cognition and relation. But it also has transports, linkages, transmitters and receivers such as people, radio, television, books, academia and the internet. It has bodies of presence which are formed of infrastructure and human agents. Though not precisely tangible, all of these transports, agents, institutions and assemblies are experientially real in our lives. They can kill or rescue a person or group just as literally as any bullet or medical treatment — often without even being locally present in any tangible way.
They are all replacements for the wrist. Everything in human cultures is vying desperately to connect to you and establish a two-way flow. Usually, these entities are fundamentally vampiric; they suck attention and resources from us (and through us, our world) and use these to pursue developmental agendas. Over time, they establish stable foundations within human experience which they aggressively elaborate and defend. This is part of the meaning of the term ‘profit’.
We are citizens of nations and we pay for everything we receive. We pay to see a ball game, a film, listen to music, or attend a church. But the payment is not merely money — it is the flow of our action, thought, attention and concern. We may be in the game or the director of films or the leader of a church, and on the receiving end of the flow. This is what the cultural agents who desire our relations are after — to be the recipients of our flow-assets — and they get it. In human cultures, the wrist is diverted away from its natural transits and authorities — broken, if you will, and then every kind of strangely mimetic parasite arises in a bid to ‘replace’ this lost connectivity with its own offerings — or to simulate it briefly — for a price.
Of course, not all of these replacements are entirely undesirable, but the seeming harmlessness often superficially perceived usually gives way to something ugly and parasitic when examined more deeply. Since we have not seen and cannot imagine what the swarming tentacles of human culture so desperately obscure to their lasting benefit, we cannot evaluate their offerings with the least bit of accuracy. Since we cannot really understand the depth and breadth of the ‘costs’, our perceptions of the benefits are woefully naive, and in the main, distorted.
Many of the cultural transports within our modern societies have become overtly poisonous in their hyperbolic departure from embodiment toward objectification. This departure forms the core of the militant commercial cultures who gladly exchange our humanity for numeric symbols in documents and studies. These are not the kinds of distributed bodies we want to be the hand of — yet this is precisely the relationship they demand of us.
Over thousands of years, we have become the vehicles which sophisticated relational parasites that we intentionally develop and transmit. Some of these are ways of knowing, like science or orthodox religion. Others are objects like automobiles and computers. Others are methods of deriving identity and value — methods of accounting. Others are activities encouraged or inhibited by various means.
The results are staggering: environmental catastrophe — in every domain we can examine. Absurdly aggressive self-conflicting constructs that range from churches built on the slavery of their own members to nations proclaiming freedom while delivering little more than atrocity, war, and the abolition of human dignity. Automobile companies advertise themselves as the connection to the wilderness their products obliterate.
The bait that conceals the hooks of these momentums is mimetic. The agents of culture mimic adventure, heroism, honor, power, convenience, beauty, healthfulness, joyfulness, and fulfillment. The reason their mimicry is effective is simple: most of the ordinary and natural transports that would otherwise carry and deliver these hoped-for resources and experiences have been co-opted or inhibited. Since they are no longer in evidence we are obliged to select from the replacements on offer by the cultural streams in which we find ourselves.
The only realistic remedy is a direct experience of what is being obscured, and one way to achieve that is to re-establish the link that the wrist once connected us to. This is an experience so rich and amazing that it requires great intimacy and creative immersion to accomplish. It is like a secret mission which is an art project designed to save the world. It is a game and a passion and a way of living with profound dignity and honor. It is a process of recognizing the actual scope and range of our beingness.
What we’re after is a glimpse of our true nature. There’s no way to say precisely what this is because it’s more than a what can contain. But one thing I can say is this: our nature is transentient superfunction, and this is what it means to be alive on Earth as an organism. But to be human is even more profound, since the scope of our perception and capacity to manipulate is far broader than that of any non-representational animal.
And a big part of the reason for that is our hands.
@~ . ~ o ~ .`^
Leaf:Stem:Branch:Trunk:Tree
Most organic forms are based on a similar arrangement which links bodies of instancing into unities7. A tree is an excellent example; particularly one with leaves. Just as the hand is a specialized instance at scale of the paradigm the body expresses, a leaf is like a specialized ‘little version’ of a tree.
Leaf structure is often bilaterally symmetrical, and the relationship of the veins to the midrib is usually highly regularized. The leaf is like a little flattened tree, with green ‘skin’ between the branches. This is the tree’s ‘hand’. One side is usually rough, and the other somewhat smoother.
It is connected by ‘a stem’ (the wrist or tail) to a working member: a branch. The branches are unified at the trunk — the unifying body.
The branches above, that produce leaves, are more articulate and connect to air and light. The branches below anchor and penetrate, connecting to solidity and moisture. The branches with leaves spend most of the day in the light. The branches below, spend much of theirs in the dark. Above the ground, at the top of the trunk, branches have leaves or similar extension. Below the trunk, in the darkness and moisture of the earth, the roots have hairs and are enmeshed in complex bacteriological networks. Now tell me. Do you happen to wear shoes? Is it not interesting that many people’s feet are constantly in darkness? How many of them do you suppose ever noticed that what roots them to the ground is most often in darkness?
But there is more here than is immediately apparent, because there is an analogy between the two aspects of the tree, and our own waking and sleeping experience. By day, we, like the upper portion of the tree, spend our lives in the atmosphere and in sunlight. We see what is stable and real, and our mind has a sense of continuity and history that is associated with the functions of our brains. By night, however, we descend into darkness, inwardly and outwardly. Our organs function differently, and our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation as it descends into the moist darkness of our guts... our stomach, intestines, and inner organs. We no longer have the same contiguous history or memory, and we experience radical worlds which, while not merely imaginary, are not precisely real, either. We ‘fall’ asleep, and where we ‘land’ can be thought of as ‘in the roots’ of consciousness and awareness. We experience dreams. In this sense, the upper and lower portions of the tree can be understood to provide a striking analogy of the cognitive and relational experiences of waking and sleeping which are fundamental to our human experience of day and night.
#( . ~ o ~ . @!
A tree also has a second stem, which leads in all the ordinary and nonordinary directions. One of those collects and transcends the others, leading upscale to that which a tree is an instance of, that which a living being is an instance of, and on across the gaps to the source of sources8.
So when you see or touch one, you’re seeing or touching an extension of yourself. A sensory-relational-learning extension. It’s physically distinct, but relationally unified. You and the tree exist as expressions of the same upscale unity. And near at hand, across the second wrist (and the second stem), you’re both expressions of a unity too astonishing to describe.
If you have feelings of wonder when you encounter nature or other living beings it is not because you have some condition or are merely biophillic. It is in part because you are discovering yourself. This is, in a manner of speaking, the only game in town — however what this means is not much like the common human interpretations. It means that you are endlessly-dimensional — a bit like the universe we emerge as expressions of.
Strands of you lead off in endless directions. And some of those directions become ways of learning, which are ways of seeing, which are ways of travel.
Like a salmon swimming up the waterfalls, we are made to find our sourceplace. But there we do not simply mate, lay eggs and perish. We are born a second time, into a new way of being ourselves which is fundamentally transentient.
From just one advancement up the ladder, these hands that write this belong to you. Your eyes that read it are my own. From just one step ‘across the second wrist’ we can together transform what it means to be human… back into a sustainable way of learning and living with our world. Across the wrist a living library awaits, and it can assemble solutions like nothing we can imagine. It assembles them in us, as us — if we will only…
…re-member together.
$! . ~ o ~ . >(
If the organisms of Earth form a family which is like a hand, which species is (most generally) the unifying member? Which are the working members? Which is the thinking member? The wrist?
(Perhaps it is not a species we are after, but individuals and groups within species… or even… amongst them.)
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It is my experience that our species most generally represents the unifying body of the organisms of Earth. The thriving myriads of organisms on our world are not separate beings, they are extensions of us. We are extensions of them. We exist in tangential dimensions of experience that are physically proximate. They act as transports into their dimensions of time, relation, and learning. We act similarly as transports for them into ours. Your dogs and birds and cats who are domesticated are examples of precisely this phenomenon. Organisms can be seen more a set of distributed organs that can link in unique ways … a sort of multi-creature — a distributed body of sentience comprising transentience.
We have incorrectly metaphied organismal distinction and science has encouraged us to miscast speciation to the degree that we view them as abstract mechanisms of distinction. The opposite is more like the truth: speciation and divergence is inherently meaningful.
The human body is shaped like a hand because we represent the upscale transport of unity. It is through our form that these experiences and expressions of unity are locally sought and achieved. We are, like all other species, a living dimension. But ours is uniquely established in connectivity with all others. We play a crucial role that only humans, with hands and thought and language can fulfil. Although we are badly confused about this as a species, Earth is staggeringly more sophisticated than our ideas. And we are expressions of Earth, ergo…
It is as if we are the hands with which the Cosmos learns and becomes itself at our scale, on Earth. When we pet an animal, the universe is petting itself. Learning itself. Knowing itself this familiar human way.
•
A word has a link to its language, and from there, to language in general. A word may be meaningfully understood to represent an instance of a language rather than a portion of one. There are junctures which act as gaps and bridges between the word its contexts, its language, and language in general. The sum of these junctures comprise the word’s tail or wrist.
