One of the curious things about Open Space -- or at least the experience of
Open Space -- is the apparently conflicted notions of "self" and "community"
flow easily and naturally together. Folks often report that they never had felt
so respected/honored/perceived as a person. And simultaneously the awareness of
the collective (may I dare say -- community?) is almost overwhelming. It never
seems to be the case that individuality must be sacrificed for the whole or
that the whole is simply an assembly of individuals. It has often occurred to
me that the "problem" of individual and community is less a function of our
experience than our logic. Or maybe our logic forces a false distinction so
that we expect the individual to be in conflict with community? This is the
logic of "either/or" -- and not both/and. It is a logic dominated by an
awareness of contradiction as opposed to paradox -- and somehow all paradoxes
are thought to be contradictory and therefore to be resolved and eliminated.
Alan Rayner, the developer and proponent of what he calls Inculsionality, has
done some interesting work in this area, and writes as follows:
"Using inclusional logic, however, the isolation of the simple, fixed notion of
self becomes subsumed by the togetherness of complex, dynamic forms (in effect
'flow forms') comprising inner, outer and intermediary spatial domains, all of
which are vital to their distinct, but not discrete, identities. Rather than
being unitary or binary, ecocentric or egocentric, such 'complex selves'
represent ternary couplings of inner with outer, of the kind alluded to by
Shakunle's 'fluid logic numbers' (see above). Their behaviour is therefore
ultimately intractable to impositional logic, as was implicitly acknowledged by
Newton 'himself' in his analysis of the 'three body problem' (Montgomery,
2001). Moreover, this behaviour can neither be regarded as intrinsically
'selfish' nor 'altruistic', because neither the disregard of the outer
('collective'/ 'we') nor inner ('individual'/'I') aspect is evolutionarily
sustainable in such a co-creative system."
The language is a little turgid I guess -- but I find the notions appealing.
Harrison
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
301-365-2093
207-763-3261 (summer)
website www.openspaceworld.com
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