It’s Child’s Play: Contemplative Anthropocosmic Creativity

Abstract

The implicate or quantum connectivity of the coevolving phenomena of the cosmos, the ontohermeneutic complementarity relations between ourselves and the vast and minute systems we coconstitutingly participate, observe, prolong, and contextualize, and the eco-reciprocities among all forms of life afford us an understanding of ourselves as fractal or microcosmic embodiments and performances of what is irreducibly nondual anthropo-cosmogenesis. And if cosmogenesis is a self-referential process having nothing external to itself from which to obtain gain or satisfaction, we may analogously interpret our noninstrumentalizing contemplative experiences in complete attentiveness without regard to external payoffs as the fractal play of its creatively emergent self-delighting anthropocosmic self-awareness in the human dimensionality. Our attentive, noninstrumentalizing, and nonobjectifying contemplativity aconceptually presences connectivity and reciprocity in an aperspectivally transparent enactment of anthropocosmic ongoing-wholing whose meaning is the being of its own self-delighting. The sustainability of cocreative anthropocosmogenesis on Earth flourishes where our conduct and intrinsically rewarding contemplativity are consonant with and recreate the spontaneous coevolutionary play of intrinsically rewarding creatio continua unreduced, unobstructed, unfragmented, and uneclipsed by partial, excessively dualizing perspectives and related efforts for extrinsic gain.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocosmogenesis
• contemplation
• cosmogenesis
• creativity
• play
• sustainability

Notes

¹Berry (1988) also speaks here of humans as an event as/by which the ongoing-co-creating celebrates itself in a context of our forming spiritual and ecohumane bonds with the natural world, “a bonding based on the principle of mutual enhancement,” 178–179, and passim; performing and celebrating see also note 3; shu is a theme developed in the Confucian classic Zhong Yong (Chung-yung), see Tu's Centrality and Commonality (1989); cognate with shu and the more familiar wuwei or action-without-effort of early and ever-apt Chinese philosophy is wu xiang wei connoting the kind of non-doing-together or co-(non)-selfing in effortless reciprocity that is respect and friendship among human persons and is modeled by the mutual deference or selflessness of the systems of the universe in their only mutual coevolutionary coconstitution (Wu 1982, 24, 115–116; For a long and interculturally rewarding look at the Humpty Dumpty trope see Girardot's (1983) Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism and see too the motif of Uroboros in Primack and Abrams (2006), The View from the Center of the Universe.

²Maximus the Confessor (see Thuneberg 1985); perichoresis (Thuneberg 1985, 24–27, 32).

³Gebser (1984) speaks of hyper-quantitative forms of thought as “deficient” manifestations of the mental consciousness structure; performing and celebrating (see note 1) may be taken as analogs for the mutual, simultaneous “imparting and receiving” of truth or ever-present origin in integral consciousness (see Gebser's Synoptic Table and passim).

⁴Holistic relational ontology and connectivity appear in Munteanu (2013, 26); versions of light are mentioned in Munteanu (2013, 27 and passim); see also comparative cosmogony as discussed in Hetherington (1993); see also Haisch (2006, 152), where this astrophysicist proposes that “There may be a spiritual substance to science as well as a scientific substance to spirit, with light as the key link. The time has come to reintegrate the two.” And see Haisch's “Brilliant Disguise: Light, Matter and the Zero-Point Field,” http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/∼sai/zpf_haisch.htm/ (accessed March 4, 2014).

⁵Creatio continua, koinonia appear in Munteanu (2013, 27, 40), and communion and intercommunication, information, semiosphere (Munteanu 2013, 29–37 passim); see also concerning semiosis, ecosemiosis, and related themes Corrington (1997 and 1994); for an extended interpretation of emergent ententionality in the universe see Deacon (2012, 143–144 and passim); on Ψ see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation (accessed March 2, 2014); see also Stapp (2007); aesthetic cosmogenesis, see Callicott and Ames (1989, 117); on differential uniqueness see Gregory Bateson (1979); on play also see in particular: Stuart Brown, National Institute For Play, “Play Prevents Violence, Promotes Empathy and Flexibility,” http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/play/, and see also http://vimeo.com/34233390?mid=5767666/, N. B., https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/play-spirit-and-character-1#t =0:00/; on play see also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI&feature=player_embedded/ (all accessed Mar. 23, 2014); Brown (2008) is a TED talk (accessed March 26, 2014) at http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital/

⁶On the multivariate manifestations of the structures of consciousness see Gebser, Part Two: “Manifestations of the Aperspectival World” (1984, 277–577).

⁷Aperspectivalism: n.b. in Gebser, Part Two (1984, 277–281); also 300 where we learn that “The new consciousness structure has nothing to do with might, rule, and overpowering. Thus it cannot be striven for, only elicited and awakened. Anyone who strives for it, intending to attain it mentally, is condemned to failure at the outset…. There is a need for a certain detachment toward oneself and the world, a gradually maturing equilibrium of all the inherent components and consciousness structures….” (The Chinese wuwei or action without effort and striving of this also draws attention to Gebser's Part Two, Chapter Three, “The Nature of Creativity,” 313: ff, and on 316 to Gebser's statement that “Creativity in man is an effectualization of the creative in the world” which itself follows his comment about the first hexagram of the Yijing which is Qian, called Creativity, The Creative, and whose sources are “the primal depths of the universe,” 315; Gebser relied on Baynes's 1967 English translation of Wilhelm's preceding German translation); Monteanu's hermeneutics of creation (40), main aim of existence (40), overcoming each sort of violence (41), culture of kenosis (self-emptying, and cf. Gelassenheit) (39); ecology of earthmind see Bateson (1972, 1979); if we place his thinking in the context of an integrative structure of consciousness, we may understand Morin (2008, 6) to add that “a paradigm of distinction-conjunction… would incorporate the principle of Unitas Multiplex, that escapes abstract unity whether high ([totalizing] holism) or low (reductionism)”; for a recent variant of the theme of (flourishingly sustainable or a/conceptual) kenosis see development of the ideas of “personal risk” in shared “biophilic” or “cosmophilic” stories in Johnston (2014).

⁸Citations from Bohm are taken from the online presentation of his twenty-four-page essay “Meaning and Information,” http://www.implicity.org/Downloads/Bohm_meaning±information.pdf/ (accessed March 11, 2014); the original printed source is in the References as Pylkkänen (1989).

⁹Grandfather Fire in Primack and Abrams (2006, 33–37; see also Abrams and Primack 2011); Great Flaring Forth see Swimme and Berry (1994); chance, hazard, and blind necessity see Monod (1972); Ecozoic Era see Berry, http://www.earth-community.org/images/The%20Ecozoic%20Era.pdf/ (accessed March 12, 2014); l’amor in Dante's Paradiso xxxiii (145).

¹⁰We’ll have to leave aside for today the question of a metaverse; though again, of the hypothetical inter- or multisystem “taken as a whole,” the same kind of points might be made; see Smolin (1997), and see Kitchener (1988); Gebser (1984, e.g., 7 and passim) does not equate integral with contemplative awareness as readily as I do.