From Emptiness To Openness The Receptive Space of Inclusionality

1. From Emptiness To OpennessThe Receptive Space of Inclusionality

2. Twelve Openings

3. 1a Think of Nature as a continually transforming fluid flow with variable viscosity and without fixed edges…

4. 1b …as in the eddying mainstream of a river ..the swirling of atmospheric, oceanic and galactic currents ..the growth, death, decay and re-growth of forest trees ..the flocking and shoaling of birds, sheep and fish

5. 2a Recognise that you can’t truly make sense of how this flow arises and evolves …

6. 2b …by pretending that space is restricted to the surface of a sphere or within a cubical box made up of lots of little cubical boxes containing isolated objects moving against a pre-set time frame

7. 3a Appreciate that although the flow can differentiate and integrate into what look like discrete parts and wholes…

8. 3b …these cannot, by themselves, reproduce the natural energy flow of ‘place-time’ – somewhere as a dynamic inclusion of everywhere

9. 4a Understand that what makes flow possible is the dynamic inclusion of immaterial ‘space’ or ‘darkness’…

10. 4b …throughout and around the ‘focal point’ of what would otherwise be a dimensionless, static point of ‘mass’ or ‘force’ without size or shape

11. 5a Realize that it makes sense to regard this space as openness or no-thingness, a vital receptive presence everywhere, not as emptiness – absolute nothingness …

12. 5b …receptive space is like the solvent ‘medium’ that loosens up a condensed blob of paint pigment so that it can spread out fluidly and diversify into all kinds of expressions of energy flow i.e. as varied dynamic configurations of ‘darkness in light and light in darkness’

13. 6a Acknowledge that the distinct, locally observable fluid configurations or natural ‘flow-forms’ that we may speak of as ‘things’, ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’…

14. 6b …can’t actually be defineddiscretely, as if they were independent from one another or the common pool of receptive space that permeates within, through and around them

15. 7a Accept that, so far as anyone can tell, receptive space is absolutely everywhere, i.e. limitless or ‘non-local’…

16. 7b …which is why Nature is infinite, a continually transforming fluid flow that cannot be localized completely anywhere …or divided up into independent little boxes that can only be moved by force imposed from an objective ‘somewhere else’

17. 8a Regard mental efforts to confine Nature to a single-centred ‘whole’ complete with local‘parts’…

18. 8b …as the source of a very partial and inverted worldview that unnaturally gives precedence to content over context – local informational ‘Figure’ over infinite spatial ‘Ground’ … and hence reduces natural quality to abstract quantity, whilst predisposing us to conflict with or subjugation by an imaginary ‘opposing other’ beyond the limits of individual bodily boundaries

19. 9a Consider that since bodily boundaries are actually dynamic inclusions of space, not absolute limits between subjective ‘insides’ and objective ‘outsides’…

20. 9b …there is no basis for opposition between ‘one’ and/or ‘other’, ‘life’ and/or ‘death’; instead each dynamically includes other

21. 10a Changing our perception of space from 'emptiness to openness' and accepting that we inhabit fluid boundaries transforms our way of relating to the world and one another.

22. 10b … It removes the hard, imaginary dividing lines that bring opposition and conflict, and opens us up to the possibility of loving, creative, protective and compassionate relationship.

23. 11a We can love neighbourhood as self and so be liberated from the oppression of definitive systems of logic, mathematics, language, science, theology and governance

24. 11b …that reinforce concrete objective limits to satisfy incompatible and unrealistic desires for absolute independence and security in an intrinsically uncertain, continually evolving fluid flow

25. 12a Don’t declare self independent from neighbourhood, because to do so is cancerous…

26. 12b …encouraging an incoherent and evolutionarily unsustainable culture of parasites, bullies and victims, defined as subjects and objects, winners and losers, extant and extinct

27. Inclusionality …the understanding that matter cannot be isolated from space, and space is not emptiness, devoid of meaning, but openness, full of creative influence. Hence nature is a fluid continuum of mutually inclusive informational (responsive resistance) and spatial (receptive openness) phases in which all form is flow-form, a dynamic configuration of everywhere in somewhere, with no fixed centre

28. Natural Inclusion …the co-creative, fluid-dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context, whereby self-identity arises within the context of, not in isolation from natural neighbourhood Individual ‘self’ is not a groundless ‘Figure’, a domineering singularity isolated from space, but a ‘transfigural expression’ of space through its unique focal ‘point-influence’

29. Natural Communion …the dynamic continuity of all Nature in receptive spatial context. …Note that whereas communion implies spatial continuity, connectivity implies informational contiguity. …both communion and connectivity are vital to inclusionality, but they have distinctive meanings

30. For Further Exploration • Site for Newcomers www.inclusionality.org • Site for Researchers www.inclusional-research.org