Offerings, Gifts, and Invitations
The Edge of Knowing, Life’s Intrinsic Value & Ecological Fittings
For a moment, the world goes quiet. A gaze out over the sea toward a horizon line tinged with pink. I hear the faint sound of waves lapping at the shore below me. Even with that faint sound, the air is full - and thick with the anticipatory glow of early morning light.
Any sense of time fades away as an image I’ve carried deep within me is reflected toward me from my environment. Inner and outer mirror each other. I feel met at a level that is beyond and before words. Anyone who passed me on the sidewalk would likely agree that this living image unfolding before us was aesthetically pleasing. It’s a scene bathed in beauty.
Over the past year, I’ve heard the word aesthetic mentioned a lot, primarily concerning work on leadership and understanding how our environment and the objects we interact with shape our perception. Beauty has played a vital role in creating a sense of ease and well-being, so the focus on beauty in leadership sparked my curiosity.
Beauty is a positive experience concerning what is perceived. According to van Heusden, it can also express a positive experience regarding an intentional action or artefact that is well done or skillfully crafted. Beauty also arises in sensemaking, our judgement of how the quality of something is reflected and contributes to a sense of equilibrium or homeostasis in how we experience and interpret the world.
In other words, there is an evolutionary aspect to beauty. The positive value of beauty, which spans all three areas in which it manifests, suggests that the perception, the action or the sensemaking process contribute to a sense of equilibrium or homeostasis. Experiencing this sense of well-being that arises from beauty tends to lead to a feeling of well-being, of being safe, and, I might add, to a more profound sense of purpose.
A man named Kull1 spoke about how these experiences of equilibrium reflect life’s intrinsic value and an organism’s ecological fit with its environment. This notion highlights the possibility that aesthetics and what we view as beautiful is self-rewarding, to an extent self-affirming, if we think of a more extensive notion of self that is larger than our everyday identity or ego and based on recognition. To experience this sense of equilibrium, we have to be able to recognise beauty.
Purpose has also been coming up in my research. In interviews I’ve conducted so far, participants have spoken about a sense of purpose being a vital force that helps them find their way in times of uncertainty infused with dynamic complexity. Some participants talked about recalling their purpose to get unstuck or revisiting it when they feel disillusioned or uncertain. However, what caught my attention was how a few people spoke about how a sense of purpose finds them. For example, they’d be going about their day when something unexpected suddenly happened, and they would notice something that grabbed their attention. This unexpected signal could be a word, a sound, a sensation in their body, etc, that struck a chord within them. Sometimes, it reminded them of something they knew deep down; other times, it pointed to something they did not know yet - but had a sense would be significant.
One common theme among the accounts was that it was in moments when participants were at their edge of understanding that these signals of a deeper purpose seemed to emerge. This has left me wondering if we can stay at the edge of what we know just a bit longer than might feel comfortable - what could we discover? And what elements of our purpose could find us?
What I’m Reading
This month I’m sharing two articles that have informed my thinking and evoked some new ways of thinking about my life and work. Each article heading has a hyperlink where you can access the article for free via a shared folder in my google drive.
Perception, Action and Sense Making: The Three Realms of the Aesthetic, by Barend van Heusden
This article inspired a lot of my thinking in the offerings section above. Van Heusden explores the role beauty plays in human culture. He highlights the importance of positive experiences in our sensemaking processes, arguing that the moments when we experience beauty evoke a state of equilibrium, pointing to an ‘ecological semiotic fitting’ which suggests these moments reveal something vital and intrinsic about life.
In this article, Simpson (one of my PhD supervisors) and French explore the ways in which learning arises at the edge of knowing and not-knowing. To do so they draw upon the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and several pieces of artwork. They engage with Bion’s symbols of ‘K’ which represents knowing and ‘O’ which is described as truth or the formless infinite. While O is a bit illusive they propose that O is essentially unknowable, but that as we engage with it we are exposed to truth in the moment and as a result open to potential for learning. One of the ideas that has stayed with me from this article is the emphasis of growth of mind, through engaging with O rather than pursuing understanding as a form of attainment.
Friday, April 5th, 3:30-5:30 pm PDT // Saturday April 6th, 9:30-11:30 am AEDT
This 2-hour session will focus on practising a process-oriented approach to working with others. During the session there will be opportunities for direct and indirect learning. You may bring a question to the session and watch the work, and engage in practice with this question in mind, or notice something that catches your attention within the session and explore the possibility that what you’re noticing has something to teach you as well. There will be an inner work, time to connect in small groups, a demo of me working with someone in the centre, and time to practise in pairs. Learn more and register here.
Thursday March 21st, 3:00-5:00 pm PDT // Friday March 22nd, 9:00-11:00 am AEDT
Are you curious about how myth intersects and overlaps with everyday life?
Are you interested in learning to track long term themes and patterns in yourself and those you work with?
Join Rose Harvey and I for a 2-hour session to explore cases and questions through the lens of myth. This offering is open to all who are interested in learning to bring a mythic perspective to their life and work. Together, we will explore how we can bring a mythic dimension to our work by considering how mythic patterns manifest in different ways and at various scales.
When we’re feeling unsettled, a desire to engage more fully in our lives and our work with others, we may be experiencing an invitation to connect with the mythic dimension of our experience. This is the level that is both deeply personal and universal and contains patterns and archetypal themes. Maybe you’re feeling stuck with a client, want to take the work deeper or support yourself and others to connect with a sense of purpose and resilience to navigate current challenges and the tensions of recent times. Connecting with the mythic layer offers insight into wherever we are and resources we can draw upon as we engage in our lives. Learn more and register here
Kull, K. (2018). Choosing and learning: Semiosis means choice. Sign Systems Studies, 46(4), 452–466 von Uexküll, J. (1928). Theoretische Biologie. 2te Aufl. Berlin: Springer