Connection
Sensing the connections between body and senses, mind and spirit, heart and soul
July 29, 2023
A bi-weekly conversation in Zoom, every second Saturday at 8am Pacific Time, inspired by the world building session with Trimtab Space Camp Mesosphere visionary Tony Patrick in 2020. In our conversations, we mused that we were a World Weavers Web, weaving synergetically as a synarchy, rather than in the dominant mode of dominating over nature as architects and builders, and collectively agreed to change the name of the group to World Weavers.
Connection
I am enough
because we are enough.
My body is connected
to the senses of the Earth.
I am infinite
because we are infinite.
My mind is connected
to the spirit of the Sun.
I am one
because we are one.
My heart is connected
to the soul of the Moon.
I am love
because we are love.
My whole being is connected
to the life of the Universe.
Mental Model
At the beginning of this week, I was exploring the possibility of creating a physical model of my poetry. I am planning that this will be the basis for my talk on Sunday with the 52 Living Ideas community.
Relationships
Connection is the theme of this mental model. The legal and political structures of our social, economic, and political systems have been built on models that are based on the individual in isolation from the collective. They are built upon personal property and personal worth, based on one’s access to financial capital and real estate assets. This mental model is in contrast to these human institutions. Instead, this is a model based on life and the connection of all life on Earth to our relationships with the Sun and Moon. These celestial spheres are interacting with each other through gravity, radiation, and precession. Everything is in motion. The orbit and rotation of these spheres set the rhythms of life. We are relationships of energy.
The View from Somewhere
From the outset, I want to be clear about the perspective I am offering. The modern world has created what appear to be two opposing models of the world: in the vernacular of the religious, these are the secular and the sacred. In the vernacular of science, they might be referred to as physics and metaphysics. Often, the split in understanding is categorized as a modern, scientific and Western philosophy and a traditional, mystical and Eastern practice. I am an integration of both, having been born to an English-Canadian mother and a Chinese father. However, in another sense, I am neither, because I have been disconnected from my roots by my experiences growing up in Canada, a country built around the erasure and assimilation of indigenous cultures.
Each of us have a unique perspective. The concept of the objective perspective of journalism is constructed from a culture that is built around the erasure and assimilation of indigenous cultures and the breaking down of collective communities of care into individuals whose reliance and dependence on national and corporate institutions is secured by division, separation, competition, and the atomization of the self to facilitate the governance of the many by the few.
Lewis Raven Wallace brings attention to this concept of perspective in the book, The View from Somewhere.
Language as Dynamic and Fluid
I cannot assume that we share the same language. The meanings of words are constantly changing as we form our shared understanding of language collectively through the process of communication. Art, communication, and design have formed my background in education and work. I have been working as a designer since 1988. I have experienced how the meaning and process of design and communication have changed profoundly as people adopt new technologies. We have been going through a process of ephemeralization, shifting from the design, prototyping, manufacturing, and production of physical artifacts to the design of social systems. In this process, I have also been letting go of this expected role in society of a designer as my primary identity. Working for a living has not really been working out for me recently. I am leaning more toward my first love as a child. I wanted to be an artist. I settled for design, because I was convinced that this vocation was my way of turning art into a living.
I have been working as a graphic designer in print, video, and web on projects involving brand and visual identity design, corporate communications, marketing, advertising, and web design and development. I have taught in a university setting and, most recently, I have been mentoring designers with an online platform for UX design—user experience design.
That is how I came to be interested in mental models.
According to Jakob Nielsen, “Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI).”
A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.
Note the two important elements of this definition:
A mental model is based on belief, not facts: that is, it’s a model of what users know (or think they know) about a system such as your website. Hopefully, users’ thinking is closely related to reality because they base their predictions about the system on their mental models and thus plan their future actions based on how that model predicts the appropriate course. It’s a prime goal for designers to make the user interface communicate the system’s basic nature well enough that users form reasonably accurate (and thus useful) mental models.
Individual users each have their own mental model. A mental model is internal to each user’s brain, and different users might construct different mental models of the same user interface. Further, one of usability’s big dilemmas is the common gap between designers’ and users’ mental models. Because designers know too much, they form wonderful mental models of their own creations, leading them to believe that each feature is easy to understand. Users’ mental models of the UI are likely to be somewhat more deficient, making it more likely for people to make mistakes and find the design much more difficult to use.
Finally, mental models are in flux exactly because they’re embedded in a brain rather than fixed in an external medium. Additional experience with the system can obviously change the model, but users might also update their mental models based on stimuli from elsewhere, such as talking to other users or even applying lessons from other systems.
Business Models
In design, we focus on the development of successful business models. According to the design thinking methodology popularized by IDEO, a successful design process is able to design products that fit within the intersection of these three criteria of human-centred design:
Desirable (human)
Feasible (technology)
Viable (business)
That is, the product meets a human need; the product is technologically feasible; and the product is an integral part of a viable business model.
However, if the focus of our work as designers is only on human-centred design, that means that we are leaving so much out of our model. The anthropocentrism of our approach has brought about the Anthropocene.
Life-Centred Design
(Note that the Canadian spelling of “centre” is one way for me to assert an identity that is different from an “American” identity, a sort of cultural inflection to accent my writing.)
I began with an expanded sense of what it means to explore the complexity of human experience by creating mental models that explore the inner sense of self from which we grow and build our social systems.
Again, this process expanded to include the more-than-human world of living beings with whom we share this planet. This has been a process of seeing myself as whole and then seeing myself within the whole of the living organism of the Earth, in relationship with the Sun and the Moon within the whole of the living universe.
It is from this perspective that I have been playing with the English language to find connections in all of these relationships of time, energy, and matter within the experience of being a mind, a heart, and a body. These triangles of relationships seemed to be pointing to something larger—a greater sense of the whole.
Becoming acquainted with Buckminster Fuller has enhanced my sense of the dynamic equilibrium of tension, compression, and precession that is an expression of universal principles of life within all of these interconnected and interdependent relationships.
Glossary
A glossary is a way of playing with language to create a shared sense of meaning around the words that we are discussing in this ongoing conversation we call life.
Physics
Time, energy, and matter are the primary elements of the universe that we explore through the study of our physical reality. I am drawing from Einstein’s equation E=mc²
as a way to make a distinction between physics and metaphysics. Physics refers to that which is measurable and quantifiable.
Time
Time is an abstract concept that relates to physical matter in various states of change related to energy and motion that is perceived as a sequence of events. Time is one of the factors in the quantities that we measure to perceive change.
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.
Energy
Energy is an abstract concept that relates to physical matter in various states of motion over time, which can be stored as potential or released as a physical force, often referred to as work. The Greek word ergon means work.
Work, measured in terms of the quantity of heat to which it is equivalent.
Matter
Matter is an abstract concept that relates to the substance of physical reality that can be quantified by mass and volume.
In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume.
Metaphysics
Literally, metaphysics refers to that which is beyond (meta) physics. Physics refers to quantities—to that which is measurable and quantifiable. Metaphysics refers to qualia—to that which is experienced as subjective sensations, feelings, and thoughts within the complex of mind, heart, and body.
In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; singular form: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, and the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characteristics of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.
Body
The body is the aspect of a living being that experiences action and behaviours.
Mind
The mind is the aspect of a living being that experiences cognition and thoughts.
Heart
The heart is the aspect of a living being that experiences emotion and feelings.
Senses
The body and mind connect through the sense of time, which is perceived through interaction with the physical senses of the body.
Spirit
The mind and heart connect through the sense of energy, which is perceived through interaction with the spirit.
Soul
The heart and body connect through the sense of matter, which is perceived through interaction with the soul.
Self
The body, mind, and heart connect to the sense of self, which is the receptor of all the perceptions, including sensations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
Being
The whole being includes perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). These are the elements of experience defined by Jesse James Garrett in his talk on Design for Engagement. The tetrahedral model expands on this model to include the senses, spirit, and soul as connections between the metaphysical experience of the body, mind, and heart and the physical reality of time, energy, and matter. The tetrahedral model may be considered more of a tetra-ops, a foureyes, as the triangles offer windows to the soul through the four eyes of the tetrahedral structure.
Tensegrity
In tensegrity, both tension and compression are held in an integrity of dynamic equilibrium.
Gravity
Gravity is the inner impulse of the universe, a compression toward coherence, drawing in toward the centre of a body of time, energy, and matter. It may be noted that gravity tends to create a precessional effect of rotation, orbit, and spiraling motion to hold bodies of time, energy, and mass circumferentially in a sort of elliptical embrace, a relationship of dynamic equilibrium.
Radiation
Radiation is the outer impulse of the universe, a tension toward expansion, drawing out from the centre of a body of time, energy, and matter.
Precession
For a body in motion, precession is any action or movement that occurs at 90 degrees to its main direction of motion.
Another way to put it is that an entity may be moving in a direction towards its goal, but at 90 degrees to it, something else is happening that may be very beneficial to the overall ecosystem that the entity is in. This precessional action may actually be of such critical importance to the health of the ecosystem, that one can think of it as the entity’s “purpose”.
How Buckminster Fuller’s Principle of Precession Can Change Your Life
Love
Love is the integral of gravity and radiation. (Synergetics 543.22)
One could say that life and love are the precessional effects of gravity and radiation. Life is the physical effect of gravity and radiation, and love is the metaphysical effect of the inner and outer architecture of the universe.
Inspiration
Inspiration is the connection between the self and the body. The body forms the metaphysical connection between time and matter. The precessional effect of the body is inspiration. Interaction with other bodies creates syntropy, which is life.
Intention
Intention is the connection between the self and the mind. The mind forms the metaphysical connection between time and energy. The precessional effect of the mind is intention. Interaction with other minds has the potential to create synthesis.
Intimacy
Intimacy is the connection between the self and the heart. The heart forms the metaphysical connection between energy and matter. The precessional effect of the heart is intimacy. Interaction with other hearts has the potential to create a metaphysical synesthesia, a blending of hearts into a sense of collective unity and wonder.
Interbeing
Interbeing is the connection between the body and the mind. The body and mind connect through the senses, perceiving the waves of motion and vibration through balance (gravity), taste (chemical interaction, liquid), sight (light radiation), smell (chemical interaction, air), sound (air vibrations), and touch (heat, pressure, and physical vibrations). Interaction with other beings has the potential to create synchronicity.
Intuition
Intuition is the connection between the heart and the mind. The heart and the mind connect through the spirit, perceiving changes in emotional energy. For example, facial expressions signal shifts in emotional state. There is a particular energy associated with the tone of voice. The content of language can profoundly shift the energy in a room. Interaction with other spirits has the potential to create synergy.
Integrity
Integrity is the connection between the heart and the body. The heart and the body connect through the soul, perceiving changes in the physical and emotional states of the self, seeking a state of homeostasis and equilibrium. Interaction with other souls has the potential to create synarchy.
Syntropy
Syntropy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as physical bodies.
Synthesis
Synthesis is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as mental bodies.
Synesthesia
Synesthesia is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as emotional bodies.
Synchronicity
Synchronicity is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as temporal bodies.
Synergy
Synergy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as energetic bodies.
Synarchy
Synarchy is the collective expression of the interaction of living beings as material bodies.
A Bi-Weekly Zoom Meeting
Join us in our World Weavers conversations as we explore the inward journey into who we are as human beings and sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting carefully as we consider the world that we are weaving together for the generations to come.
We are experimenting with Substack as an alternative to the Google Group as a way to stay connected in between World Weavers meetings. Add your email to the mailing list for the World Weavers by subscribing to Trimtab.