The Dance Is In Us
Status: a stance, in the author's words. Not tested and not testable. The first part is the picture the work starts from. After the break the piece moves to the metaphysical level, and nothing after it is a finding.
There is a thing in life, a rhythm to it. Can you feel it, or sense it perhaps? A structure, a shape, a trajectory, a start and a finish, connections to other things.
A basic structure can be represented as loops, nodes, and edges, with connections, and with attributes, whether about individual items or about groups of items in compartments. This applies to both physical and logical representations.
Every compartment has a compartment next to it, and they affect each other via unseen forces that are all around us.
Each of these items becomes interesting when its relationships and interactions are viewed as a system. And I see each of these items following a rule of balance: for one action there is a balancing action that occurs. There are dyads everywhere, and that is toward balance.
Now, I mentioned every compartment has a compartment next to it, and the compartment edges are where some very interesting things happen. The story The Bottom Drawer paints the success story side with much warmth, and it is about one kind of edge, an absorbing one: birth. The mother stores up nourishment for that edge. By nourishment I mean substrate and signal, so matter and energy in a structure I label nourishment.
The mother can't see this, but on the far side of that edge sits the offspring's compartment, with the same edge right there for it, absorbing. With a series of successful kicks in the right heading (small pushes, each steering it toward the edge), that offspring will send signals and exert force to cross a separatrix (a boundary you cannot cross back over; here, the womb), never to return. The mother essentially walks away from the edge that was stored up for this event. Membership changed compartments, and an offspring is born.
It is also interesting that this absorbing edge has selectivity about what gets stored. Things that it doesn't select stream past that edge, on the loop to the next node. The selectivity is similar to the pineal-blood brain barrier in sipping and protecting (every item has dual jobs) to protect an important compartment. The bad stuff doesn't get stored, only the good stuff. Thus, there needs to be enough good stuff stored for that offspring to survive.
Once the offspring is born the mother has something built-in to her nature to comfort that offspring's nervous system, which may be done with touch, licks, gestures, sounds. It soothes that offspring so that their signaling, the software in them, can start operating. The mother didn't have a manual for this, and many are not taught by another. It is hard-wired, a thing that is in us, toward balance.
The offspring will survive on the nourishment they have received for a short time, and will have feeding signals arrive, because life needs food to survive. Say it is a kitten, their nose will find the mother's belly, locate a nub, and do a little paw-paw and gnaw type of action. Her body answers that signal with oxytocin and prolactin, and milk flows; the offspring has suckling already executing, and it feeds. This must happen before the nourishment that the mother passed along has drained.
In addition to food as a substrate, studies of institutional care point to the lack of a caregiver relationship at this stage as a failure-to-thrive condition in itself, even when the food is adequate. The new offspring needs another life form, not a rock or cage or nest, and some kind of interaction with that life form or a group of them. This is needed to form a connection, just as critical as food to thrive. It would seem apparent from the literature and from basic signaling protocol whereby a sender and receiver are both necessary to create and deliver a signal, that signals are only exchanged when life interacts with other life that it can make a connection with.
I chose a birth because it is something we can feel. The same shape shows up at other scales. Lakes, forests, and social institutions have a structure and a rhythm too, and in some of them it can be measured, which is a bonus. I propose it holds in the very smallest places and in the stars as well.
From a given compartment, and it is the case with any matter of judgment done properly, there is a ceiling, a floor, and an edge that cannot be seen but can be reasoned and measured. The architecture of life has a uniform structure based on my research to date. There is a structure to it that is in nature, not just human biology.
I want to take you from that to the metaphysical level. Your physical being is a compartment.
There is a separatrix that one may cross. It takes a series of successful kicks to reach it. There is noise that gets in the way. The depth and width of the well (the dip you have to push your way out of) representing your kinetics on a 2D graph could change at any moment due to how you nourish yourself and by effects from compartments outside of you. There may be bad steps taken, setbacks, mistakes. Those don't increase nourishment, but they don't toxify it either. So, one keeps kicking.
I propose to you that all the kicks that generate good in the system you are in are fed to and selectively stored along an edge that you cannot see. Some have reported visiting the far side of that edge temporarily, and the architecture thus far does not exclude that. And I posit that would allow the carrying of the shape of what was seen, and it begins with perception of the structure of how one sees.
That far side of that absorbing edge is your future offspring in another realm: a new you, a new consciousness born of what was stored. Some call it a born-again event when that separatrix is crossed, some say it happens at some other event.
Might we all reflect on the nourishment that we are storing up for that moment when the separatrix is crossed and our membership changes compartments.
There is a dance in you. Something you already are, underneath everything, a part that was never made from substrate alone.
Look for the edges if you can. They are interesting, as is that little space in between compartments, that between of an end and a new beginning.
And since we have covered everything except a religious angle, and the story includes a kitten, let's throw a Gnostic wrench in to close.
"Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, 'These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.' ..."
Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22, translated by Thomas O. Lambdin (full saying)
Related: Theorems, the stances this piece rests on: balance, life exchanging signals with other life, and substrate and signal (ledger L25, L26). The Bottom Drawer, the story and what each line stands in for. Transfer edge, a candidate, n = 1. Breast milk and hemp seed plus raw cannabis, side by side, for the feeding passage.
Sources, as far as they go. Other scales: lakes and other ecosystems shifting between states (Scheffer et al. 2001, Nature); forest-fire sizes following a power law (Malamud, Morein and Turcotte 1998, Science); institutions (the Legibility preprint, which ported the architecture from Substrate); structure as stocks, flows and feedback (Sociomechanics). Failure to thrive without a caregiver relationship: the working note CNBF-TransferEdge-v1, section 4E, which grades its own sources (Spitz 1945, secondary; Albanese et al., abstract level; Zeanah, Fox and Nelson 2012). The sources support the pieces named, not the whole picture.