Quad Crossing, third in the Creation Crossover Series

Dear IL community,

First of all, I want to Thank Maria Clemente for the honest feedback concerning my confusion about phenomenology. Phenomenology is a school of thought within the branch of philosophy called epistemology (how do we know what we think we know). In a comment within the Poem as a World... post, I used the term phenomenology in a way that suggested a view of what reality is (metaphysics), rather than phenomenology as a view of how we know what we think we know (epistemology). Click here  to read the speculative, off the mark, statements I made regarding Phenomenology and its relationship to IL. Maria's thoughtful response further suggested that my thoughts about creation crossover, in which I posit a kind of equivalence between "creations" in one quadrant vs. "creations" in another quadrant, may be mixing, rather than crossing, the quadrants.

Based on the merits of Maria's critique, I would like to submit my own specific example of quadrant crossover, in order to think about whether this particular crossover is legitimate and/or fruitful, or is merely the result of boundary violations between quadrants. A poem as a world, is, on the face of it, a confabulation of the upper left, "the Beautiful", and "I", quadrant with the lower right, "the True, and "its", quadrant. The poem is a subjective "creation", whereas the world is an objective "creation" (a creation consisting of various orders of physical objects which can be viewed externally). From that point of view, there is no "equivalence" between poem and world.

But is there enough "similarity" to allow for the natures of poem and world to crossover productively, in a sharing, somewhat integrated, fashion? As a poet-philosopher who deals frequently with metaphors which assist both thought and literature, I am strongly inclined to believe there is sufficient similarity (a "kind of" equivalence between the two objects of poem and world, and between their respective quadrants) to crossover between poem and world. 

Maria's significant contribution to my thought, is to make me realize that the gift-sharing involves a crossover between quadrants, because human gifts tend to inhabit the 4 different knowledge domains of the Integral quadrants.  If an individual is gifted in identifying how groups of people are influenced, then he or she is more likely to be at home in (and to work in) the field of political science, located somewhere in the bottom right quadrant. Her/his gift led her/him to that particular quadrant's perspective. To use the analogy of the blind men grabbing different parts of the elephant and describing the elephant in those terms, the gifted political scientist now "sees" and describes the world in terms of political science. So, to cross her/his gift over to gifts in another domain would require some extra process (such as communication which is user-friendly to each gift-area) between the "blind men". 

Another of Maria's contributions to my thought is that the "crossover" may not always be the walk in the park that a dreamer like me tends to think it is. Just like the naive saying "Why don't we all just get along", my dreaming, poet, mind tends to say "Why don't we just crossover from one domain to the other". The integral vision brings with it a fundamental faith that crossover is likely, but the quadrants may remind us to respect boundaries enough to make the crossover more than a mere "flight of fancy". The crossover is a challenge. 

Also, Maria's discussion with me became an object lesson. The actual attempt at crossover between Maria's gifts/aptitudes and mine, via blog discussion, led me to realize that Maria's gift of scholarly categorization is in a different "world" than my poetic logic. My world seemed too irresponsible and messy for the discipline of Maria's gift. And Maria's world seemed too stifling for the connective work of poetry and speculative thought involved in my world - my part of the elephant.

Interestingly, despite the disconnect between the two of us (reading between the lines, I took Maria's well wishes to me to mean "goodbye"), communication did occur, and it appeared largely salvaged by the integral quadrants. The quadrants offered us a structure by which we could navigate the discussion, no matter how other-worldly the two of us seemed to one another. The quads gave us a common language, and, perhaps, kept us from trampling over one another - kept our "worlds" from "colliding" (in reference to a Seinfeild sit com episode). 

Not only did the integral map assist in communication, it continued to assist me in refining my thoughts. I want to again thank Maria for using familiar IL terms to help sort out my conceptual musings and messes. The following are some insights (or attempted insights) which followed my (challenging) conversation with Maria. Both my defensive ego and my desire to find the truth kicked into gear. Hopefully, the later (desire for truth) predominated: 

 (To Maria) "Your impression is something I will ponder, as I do tend to see mind (and that would be upper left quad) as ultimate reality, from which the other faces of Mind are formed. Each realistic in their own program, but appearing separate due to Mya, illusion. But if pure thought were achieved, all the various 'phenomena' of the other quadrants, would be seen as forms, or energy formats, of Mind.

To me, the mind (and, perhaps Mind) most closely resembles energy. I know that this comparison of mind to energy involves a 'crossover' between the domains of the upper left,'I' quadrant, and the upper right, 'it' quadrant. I also know that some folks see such crossover as an unproductive mixing-up of the different perspectives/quadrants. And if ultimate reality turns out to be material, in which 'things' stay in their place, then the argument against quadrant crossover will turn out to be well taken. But if our understanding of ultimate reality eventually reveals that it is more like energy than matter, then there is no reason to think that a river-like, or fountain-like, crossover is happening all the time, whether we see it or not.

As long as we think like matter, I suppose we will leave the crossover strictly up to God, another dimension that we acknowledge, say that we believe, but dare not examine. To me, this 'leave that up to God' decision would be like saying you love someone, but will not gaze at them or explore their ways or 'get to know them'. Is that love? Is that truth? (I believe that love and truth eventually converge in some mind-like or energy-like format).

Energy can move around, create polarities, create fields, alter the 'key' (main frequencies) of the phenomena seen, felt, heard, manipulate, lived-in, etc.. Most of the methods of scientific inquiry and, perhaps even most of our philosophical thought is based on mater. Matter has energy, but it is not it's bag. As the glob of energy we call a mind (when looking at mind from the upper left quadrant), or the mind we call a glob of energy (when looking at energy from the upper left quadrant) begins to align with the energy-aspects of this or other universes, then it begins to align with new principles that simply don't make sense to mater-based logic.

'Right-brain' gifts, which have tended to be undervalued in this culture, except for a few famous artists, etc., may actually excel at 'thinking like energy' or like an energy field. Research has shown that the right brain is more proficient at comprehending gestalts, whole images. It is also superior at comprehending depth. My instinct to 'welcome the right brain to thought' (click here) while I was trying to form a poet-philosophy support group, seems to have been on the right track - at least if we are moving toward a belief/consensus that energy's phenomena and scientific/physical measurements more closely match "real reality" than matter's phenomena and scientific/physical measurements of matter.  

Another characteristic which I attribute to the right-brain is that it appears to comprehend dynamics better than the left hemisphere. To a right-brain-leaning mind (relative to the normal left-brain-leaning cultural bias), the sense of movement within the overall composition of a 'thing' is itself a 'real' thing or phenomena. The right brain sees movement where the left brain sees only a static form. Right-brainish gifts/aptitudes tend to put a verb-like slant on things/situations/phenomena that where previously seen in terms of nouns. 

The following two poems show this verb slanting: 

Work of Art

Nouns work like verbs.

'The catch' isn’t a stringer full of fish.

It’s the movement of a glove fulfilling its destiny.

That’s the way this task is completed,

an undoing of jobs done. 

The whistle at the end of the shift

becomes a whistle while you work, 

keeping time with saws singing through their teeth, 

and with the drum of headstrong hammers, 

‘til a job is an expression of your heart

beating life into the tools.

© 2007 Darrell Moneyhon

Motor

A discarded car

rests, rusting

in grass whose blades fill

with potent chlorophyll,

like gasoline.

Body and frame resign

to become a dull heap.

Yet, I swear, I see something leap

from that rolling hill - 

the color green!  

© 2008 Darrell Moneyhon  "

It is difficult for me to not see a type of equivalence between poem and world. The cognitive frame which these two poems create - a frame of shifting from noun emphasis to verb emphasis - feels like such a different part of the elephant, that it seems to be a "world", or a "creation", where the objects within it act differently than in a noun-dominant "world". After all this intellectual differentiation, I am still left with a strong sense that the creation called a "poem" is, in some legitimate way, similar to a "world". Though the poem lives in the upper left quad of the Beautiful ("I"), for the life of me, it seems to crossover into the lower right quad of the True ("its").

These poems seem to convey a different truth which could reside in, perhaps, a different stage of understanding. The new stage could be an understanding that energy not only can be sensed by the mind, but that it may be a more accurate way of seeing reality than matter-based paradigms. And if it is a more complete way of seeing reality, then it suggests that the way we look at "things"  impacts the content of our thoughts about the nature ultimate reality. A different question creates a different answer. Epistemology "crosses over" into Metaphysics/Cosmology.

And if that is true (on some deeper level), it's no wonder I confused the two domains earlier. I would like to think that my errors were more the result of sensing deeper truths - from seeing deeper into the fountain - than the result of inaccurate intellectual differentiation alone.

Of course, I could be wrong (again)!

                                      Darrell