An Ecology of Practices for Active Participation
Ways of Opening Our Being to Our Edge
The Active Participation practices in this article are described as being ‘Active’ rather than passive because from the Western Perspective it takes great focus to remain in these states for long. Through practice however it may be possible to flip this passive/active relationship that we currently have with our surroundings. In doing so we may be able to learn more and dig down into the roots of questions before trying to answer them and in doing so reduce the number of obstacles we each face and the time we would otherwise spend resolving them.
1. Active Listening
To actively listen to someone, or to our environment is to not think whilst they are speaking. It is to not think of an answer to a question whilst someone else is trying to answer one. It is to listen, actively paying attention to the whole situation before finally coming up with an answer. Often it is better to say nothing.
2. Active Seeing
In this case a way to actively see is to give focus to our peripheral vision and thus have reduced focus on what our eyes are directly looking at. looking up and down can help to increase visibility, without losing this focus on our peripheries.
3. Active Tasting/Smelling
A way to actively taste and smell is to pay close attention to our mouths and noses whilst eating and to be aware of the feelings that these responses evoke within us. It is to feel the warmth travelling through our bodies during and after our meals.
5. Active Touch
Finally Active Touch involves paying close attention to where our skin meets surfaces, to feel the weight of our bodies pushing down on the ground and the equal and opposite force pushing up on us from it. It can be to mentally scan our bodies, our muscles and tissues and to slowly attempt to relax them. This is often easiest to do just before falling asleep/as a way to.
What I’ve noticed whilst practicing Active Participation in these ways, is that for it to work, it is impossible to hone in on any single thing, without losing sight of what all of our senses can be telling us. Active Participation requires us to let go, to relax and see the whole. This is important because in our Western perspective everything is reductionist. We strive for specialisation, for finding niches in which we can be individuals and we have reduced our environment to a list of commodities easily viewed on a sheet. Co-incidentally we imagine our own responses whilst others are talking, we walk with blinkers, gobble down our food and never check-in to our bodies in the mad rush we’ve created for ourselves.
This leads to a very interesting question. If we were to live our lives all of the time by being Active in all of our senses rather than selective. What would we still be able to do? And more importantly what would we discover? My guess is that we would be left with all of the ‘important’ activities and an abundance of meaning too, whether it be through community, food, crafts or arts.
At the beginning of this article I showed these two images with the title ‘Our Edge’. This terminology refers to the Edge Effect Abundance which can be observed in living systems and is sometimes otherwise studied as part of Holonic structure. Here is the Capital Institute’s definition: “Creativity and abundance flourish synergistically at the “edges” of systems, where the bonds holding the dominant pattern in place are weakest”. I wanted to draw attention to this because our senses are apart of our edge with the world and because these images show the difference between living at this sensory edge in both a selective/reductionist way and an open/abundant way. At the cinema we are engulfed by the screen whereas with our feet in the sea on the shore, we are seeing, touching, smelling, possibly even tasting, all whilst at a bioregional edge, the coast, a place where all life congregates more abundantly than anywhere else.
This effect can be observed in the graphic below. When we select what we observe, we lose sight of the edge and receive much less information, due to this we are able to perceive less, because our perception is based on the culmination of our previous experiences and decisions and so we end up regurgitating only human knowledge. This results in poor actions, actions that result in firefighting. Alternatively by practicing Active Participation and by literally seeing the edge of our vision it may then be possible to see our other edges, the ones that remind us that we are not apart from nature and that we never were and can thus act as such.
An example of where we have been excelling in this regard for many centuries is Permaculture. The whole idea of which is to notice how different plants interact with each other to their benefit and to then grow them next to each other. Through our Active Participation in bringing together beings so that they may be in better relationship to each other, it has proven possible for us to share in their abundance. A perfect example of this is The Three Sisters which can be seen below, where Corn is used to provide structure for the beans and the beans fix nitrogen for the Corn and the Pumpkins. In return the Pumpkins shade the ground so that they can all get as much sunlight as possible. Whilst their interaction may have been discovered after many centuries of selective search. It is more likely that they were observed through Active Participation.
Whilst in these states it becomes easy to act upon what feels right rather than what we think is right. This is important because there is more data encoded in a feeling than a thought. A feeling can’t easily be reduced/decoded into words where a thought can. Thus any practice that brings us more in touch with our senses and thus our feelings, will inevitably bring us closer to our abundantly brighter edge.
So perhaps through these simple practices we can throw out many of the volumes of books, videos and media that promise solutions to the ever increasing number of crises that are a result of our literal reductionist view. And take all of the paths that branch out from where we stand and not just the immediate one. Perhaps through Active Participation and relationship with all of the beings around us we can learn how to walk and run for “there is no teacher who can teach anything new” these practices “can just help us to remember the things we always knew.” (Enigma)
