Inclusion and Synthesis (Walk-Around Exercise)

The walk-around assignment for this week was unexpectedly challenging for me (which is wonderful).  I say “unexpectedly challenging” because, as a student also of Integral Theory, inclusion and synthesis are primary aims and orientations.  Because this was, in a sense, such “familiar” territory — in the sense of being a basic aspiration — I thought it would an “easy” practice, but instead found it a little difficult to call it out in a “local” and deliberate way.

On the level of research or problem solving, having certain heuristic principles and fundamental perspectives available — such as first-, second-, and third-person singular and plural perspectives, as is common in IT; or time, space, and knowledge, in TSK — is helpful to make sure you aren’t ignoring important dimensions of experience or the world in your reflections on a topic, but these things can also interfere when it comes to attending deeply and fully to present, unfolding experience.  Bringing in conceptual categories in a deliberate way felt a bit too heavy-handed as I attempted to walk around and cultivate a broadly inclusive and synthetic moment-by-moment orientation.  Invoking these labels seemed to narrow and divide the field of what was present to attention.  I found I needed to have a very light touch, where a simple mantra of “Yes” or “And…” was enough to include what was present without foreclosing anything else.  In other words, a certain non-interference was needed.  On the other hand, however, I also found that a completely lax or hands-off approach wasn’t appropriate, either.  There seemed to me to be a distinct difference between undifferentiated experience and ‘included and synthesized’ experience.  At the level of pre-differentiation, there was a kind of unconsciousness; there was a kind of blending and inclusion or enfoldment, but it lacked “knowingness” or illumination.  Inclusion and synthesis called for a non-distancing or non-fragmenting differentiation, it seemed to me, which involved a difficult-to-name open involvement in the flux of experience (and pre- and post- and extra-experience).

After attending in this way for some time, I found I could shuttle lightly among time, space, and knowledge aspects of experience, or among first-, second-, and third-person aspects of experience (the I, We, and It of the flux-field), and this could amplify the sense of connections felt and dimensions sensed and included.  But starting straight away from these perspectives had proved obstructive to me; I could only ease into these differentiations from a subtle, less-articulated but still deliberate open attention that simply said “Yes” to it all.