In my Substack posts and in a blogging website called relatedness.net I am developing a theme that Life is relational movement. All movement, whether material or living, can be fully described and recognised as a triune process. Movement is changing relatedness that repatterns forms. These three are the inextricably linked features of movement – change, relatedness, and form. Our brains detect them… so that we can participate in the wholeness that is life.
Tri-unity is a way of thinking about life that resolves problems both with dualism and monism. The change feature can account for how diversity of material forms and relational mind arises spontaneously within the unity of wholeness. Triunity is a philosophy that could be known as ‘living monism’.
Process philosophy is not a love of knowledge. It is a love of wisdom… because wisdom has movement in a way that knowledge does not. Living monism integrates all change in the ecological diversity of the world and cosmos. It is truly a wisdom of love, in that the triune process describes how even disruptive or destructive movements in one locality are in their seasons brought around to re-integrate as wholeness in renewal, with a restored potential for new beginnings.
Our social ecology is consciously material. It is interactive, and constantly transforming. As participants, our responsibility is to be the presence of loving kindness stabilising the future of life in changing environments. The metaphysics that follows from triune process philosophy reveals how Golden Ratio proportionality unfolds from an etheric wholeness to shape nature and aesthetic living. Relational proportionality is the nature of life’s growth and healing. After misunderstanding has become disruptive, or disharmony has become destructive, life’s capacity for renewal and re-stabilisation unfolds from within.
This healing consistency is cosmological love moving deeper than all turmoil. Wisdom grows as we acknowledge our place in these movements. I use the word cosmos to mean a universe that births and rebirths life wherever the conditions are stabilised enough to restore and replicate the inner orderliness of growth, as forms living within shared and changing ecologies.
Endings are always new beginnings in process
Endings lead to new beginnings precisely because of the Golden Ratio’s potential to rebalance and gravitationally reconnect all movement after conflict or collision. This applies throughout the material cosmos… into which the human inner heart of triune process is holographically connected at the quantum field level.
However, the human brain has evolved into such a level of complexity that internal imbalance of the triune process becomes inevitable. Imbalance in that locality requires reflective effort to rebalance the proportionality of relatedness among fleeting or persisting mental concept patterns, which our minds can obsess about, and fix as if they should shape the world.
We obsess because we believe our thoughts are our personal identity. But the survival of our personal identity is far deeper holographically, fixed into the triune relational movement of the cosmos. Truly, from our earliest physical formation and birth into this world, forming our ‘person’ is our individual responsibility, how we learn to walk in this world with others. Born into this life-threatening world of change and opportunity, in the confusion of what is going on around us we may indeed hope that cosmological love will sustain healthy growth. But even in unloving and abusive local environments, people can still grow strong personal identities if there is some other consistent, non-shaming, emotionally responsive relationship, in which survival seems reasonable, hope seems achievable – and even joy may have its moments. The absence of all of these, however, spells potential disaster for life.
Being a consistently non-shaming presence for others is also not simple
People of all ages have the potential to be a non-shaming, consistent presence for others, not only adults. It has something to do with wise friendship. Learning to be so is a process of becoming, which involves letting go of the notion that ‘my thoughts’ are what it’s all about. Personal identity is far, far deeper than our thoughts can ever capture – far deeper than words with their potentially misunderstood meanings that can put as much alienation into the world as a fortified wall can do in material substance.
Words may stimulate curiosity, but it is heart-level awareness and sensitivity to the inner movement’s of responsive relatedness that is the true stuff of life. Finding that way, to be a consistent, non-shaming presence for others who are in the process of their own formation, is the nature of Golden Ratio loving kindness.
But anyone who has experienced grief or suffering may sense rebellion arise in their heart at such cotton wool, cuddly notions as the presence of loving kindness being traded. There is so much hatred and greed and coercive manipulation driving violence and neglect, and its history is so infectious in our memories that it shapes the now… so surely, we must think, is it the nature of life to be painful? Where does all this talk of love come from?
Here is a simple answer that unfolds from Golden Ratio rebalancing.
Without words, stretch your arms wide with the palms of your hands turned upwards in a questioning posture, and see in your mind’s eye the embodied material range created between them. It runs through your pumping heart and stretches down to your embodied feet and up to include your head and back. As you hold that posture, let your mind imagine your participation in the world around you. See the unbroken range of material connection widely out through your environment, as far as you can imagine, emerging as movement unfolding also within you, in the source of every living cell of your body. Hold that range and depth.
In just that same extensive way, love and kindness and presence generate their own wide ranges of extensive movement throughout life. Let us briefly see them one by one, and feel their ranges, and name them so that we can talk with others about our experiences of them. Let’s start with love.
Love has two modes that make its range. Love is knowable as joy when life is moving in a harmonious balance of interconnectedness. That same connection as love is knowable also as grief if there comes a time of separation, or brokenness, or misunderstanding. Grief is the movement within of love to reconnect, and to rebalance. Joy and grief can mix and mingle. They do not exclude each other.
Kindness has two modes, as warmth and responsive softness that welcomes the other into merciful relationship, and as a hardness of boundaries that we need to learn to respect, in order to sustain balance and mutuality as qualities of life change. The expression of one mode of kindness does not mean that the other has been withdrawn. They co-exist.
Presence has two modes. Presence can be intimate, in ways that can be felt, and held, and heard and smelt and lived together and shared. Presence also can be remote, as when one goes on a journey, and a lingering word or memory or imaginal dream or hope come as the thoughts of the heart to vitalise faith and to trust in the reality that these remote and present qualities of experience will shape life even now and in the future. Faithfulness, fidelity, makes the return of a remote and loving presence to an intimate closeness a time of joy and warmth. This reconnection renews and restores the walk of life through the world shared with others.
Balancing all these ranges is not a simple process. They are like waves criss-crossing the depths of life.
Living in the full range of wholeness is as complex as beauty.
We discover wholeness of life in our inner heart. Its movement is present in stillness. We cannot discover wholeness of life through our rationalising minds, with their constant naming and analysing and categorising and comparing and misconstruing. Minds are for exploration. Wholeness is peace at heart despite all turmoil, where a loving respect for life opens the way for boundaries to evolve as relatedness qualities deepen… this is the way, and the truth, and the life of wholeness throughout the eternity of cosmos. It is as beautiful as seeing a cautious smile appear on a face formerly marred by grief.
Beauty endures unmarred by the surface medium used to convey the deepest truths of life. Imperfections in musical performance, the dance, the brushwork, the poetic text, the mathematical formula, or the potter’s creation are not the utter despoilers of beauty in life that, for example, greed is. That corruption of the inner heart can be restored only by a transformative reconnection into life-enhancing community. Greed may be overcome by wise gift. Consistent feedback and mutuality may dissolve former boundaries set up by hidden unmet needs, thus healing hurts that drive greed. Light is allowed into times of darkness. The numinous light of relatedness can flow to illuminate the beauty hidden in long-lost caverns of hopes deferred, or the high mountain plains of those who had become aloof for self-protection. That beauty can be safely shared then in restored mutuality when presence has the quality called grace.
Stories are the time-framed blooms that make sense of life’s changing relational qualities and processes. Stories are the stuff of shared life. They shape people from within, so they go on to reshape the world around them. Stories slow people down to listen, so a transfiguration in light can occur.
This slowing down to listen and harmonise with a story told beautifully is like a catalytic process in biochemistry. A catalyst holds one molecule in stillness, and thus increases the probability that another differently shaped molecule that is its partner will find it and connect, so that they mutually transform in a chemical reaction that releases free energy to warm life into its healthy range of kindness within balancing boundaries.
Listening, so that others feel heard, is the catalytic basis of the living wholeness that human life seeks. Beyond the creaturely survival instincts in localities, and hopes for thriving, and drives to reproduce, many people sense the deep harmonising wisdom of a wholeness of life beyond even the death of a physical body. That is why life is sacred. Life is sacred because it has the potential to continue in numinously relational light beyond pain and suffering and even death of a physical body. Renewal of life comes through hearing the call of one who loves you, and listening for it.
Three things endure when living the complex wisdom of wholeness, a trusting faith in presence, a hope for kindness, and a love of life, and the greatest of these is love.
