Social Aspects: Up from the Depths

I like that science tends to be an attempt to go from one dot to the next, checking something that is obviously there and then seeing if and perhaps how it connects. Another type of distributed processing is more like seeing some dark mass rise up form the depths of the ocean or someone walk out of the fog. In this way, we don't begin with concrete points. We begin more with a somewhat vague shape and that shape solidifies, becoming clearer as we come closer to it. Just to be clear, I like applying each method to the other. Science helps us throw out a lot of bullshit and dealing in a more diffuse sort of distribution of things helps forward science by encouraging imaginative hypotheses. (Keep in mind that most hypotheses come up false or unproven and those also tend not to get published. In other words, most of science is lost--even to the scientific community that doesn't see fit to publish the things that even they have found that they do not understand.)

So this type of distributed processing is less like learning algebra--which actually does make sense once you can connect the dots--and more like dreaming or imagination. This fits with what Eugene Gendlin calls FOCUSING--noticing the changes in one's felt sense of body, mind, and world. This may bring us into murky areas that genuine scientists are fascinated by and pretenders deny out of hand. Shamans are at home here, but they too often seem to deny science or accountability. Well then, I guess it is up to reasonable and intelligent folks to figure it out.

Most simple this sort of distributed processing begins with hints, glimmers, tracks. We start with some hair on a treebranch, a track on the ground, but not the animal itself. We see something that our imagination tells us could be the Lock Ness monster but is probably not and we are left wondering about ripples. Every intelligent mammal is interested by these things that they recognize as signs--the only exception being humans who have been taught to be reductionists and animals so exhausted as to have no energy to sustain their curiosity.

If we apply the mammal intelligence given us by God, Charles Darwin, and Mother Earth (a fascinating menage a trois as ever there was), we pay attention. Now, the sort of attention that tends to lead to discovery in these types of cases is more like that song lyric, "Hold on loosely...but don't let go," than it is like the sort of focus we need in order to cram for that freshman-year physics final. It is more like the long-term focus it takes to parent than the short-term lazer-focus of the lion about to pounce. In the moment, we recognize that if we try to crush the potential butterfly in a bear trap, we may get nothing more than an indistinct smudge. Hopes are often like that butterfly, dreams for the future, ideals, the visions we have of what might be best within ourselves. I tend to prefer the people who use a net (not a bear-trap) and go after actual butterflies to those who only imagine butterflies and fairies and whatnot, but we need some of all types I'm sure. I'm also sure that I was stabbed by a vampire assassin last night in my dream; while I eventually killed him because he was too slow, the knife he used infected me in some way; it was a very fun dream, and I woke wondering if it meant anything useful or if it was "just a dream".

In the same way that I might be prompted by the energy and imagery of that dream to add some meaning to it, we can be prompted socially to move towards something like racial and gender equality by dreaming of the possibility and feeling energized by that hope. So there is this sort of distributed processing in response to psychological glimmers and also some sort of fumbling forwards due to idealization. Fumbling forwards when we can't really plan what will happen at Kent St., for example, is also distributed processing. This type of movement encompasses the sorts of questions like, "But did the Vietnam protesters really act in solidarity with the civil rights movement?" The answer, as often as not with this sort of process, is, "Sort of." To the same extent that dreams might motivate people if those people ascribe meaning to them, social acts are interpreted from different angles and propagandized by different sides. Sometimes it works out to be David or Vietnam, but Goliath usually wins. The bear trap is less likely to end as a smudge than the butterfly. The question is, if you are Goliath, do you want to be the villain? If you are not Goliath, you will most likely finds that imagination counts.