Disassembly Manifesto Chapter One

The Dance at the Heart of Being

Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.

There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.

Found the coin?

1.      The dance at the heart of being

We start with a disassembly of an old story that has gripped the imagination: It is time to point out a flaw within the Copernican revolution. Copernicus taught us all that it is not the case that everything revolves around the Earth. No! In fact, he suggested, all planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. How silly of us humans to think that things revolved around us! In fact it is the sun that is the central object of our lives. We still teach it like this in school, papier mâché solar systems with that bright egg yolk ball in the middle. Except! Like many stories we have told ourselves to make sense of the world, this neat vision of a spiralling dance fails to include several key truths that explicitly exist in reality and demand we assemble this story differently. We will do this a lot through this work – Look at the story being told and then get to what else is going on. We are going to look at things as they are, not just think about them. Don’t panic! I am not about to say that the planets do not revolve around the sun, of course they do. Except the sun is no more the centre of things than the Earth is. Copernicus simply swapped out the thing at the centre from one corporeal body for another. I want you to understand that this was not far enough – A different face for the same idea. We know well enough now that this Sol system is in fact tumbling around the gyre at the heart of our galaxy and that this Milky Way galaxy is careening around something even wider in near unfathomable complexity. There is no solid object at the heart of the Milky Way, as the sun is itself not solid and singular, as the Earth is not in fact. The objects we place at the centre of a spiralling image are in fact never just one thing. We can scale up or down from the microscopic to the intergalactic scale and the same thing will be true, and it is not true that something easily understandable sits on a throne as all else dance a divine choreography around it.

In other words, we still teach the mistake made before Copernicus: That there is one, solid thing at the centre of the universe, at the heart of being, around which other things rotate in ordered harmony. Our lazy brains who love a shortcut to reduce cognitive load tell us the sun is a solid object unless we disassemble the assumption. We know, if we think about it critically, that it is in fact a fury of reactions screaming until it runs out of fuel. A violent complexity of chaotic explosions happening in close proximity. We know, if we think about it, that the planets are not circling elegantly around the sun but in fact are constantly trying to fall into it and missing. Can you see the chaos that is really there? Seeing order where chaos really resides is a helpful shortcut for not having to think too hard about things sometimes. The moon revolves around the Earth but if it could have what it wants it would slam into us without mercy or else fling itself off into the dark and deep recesses between stars. It is luck, you could say, or the result of convenient mathematics, that it does not do either.

We need to get this unhelpful assumption out of the way before we can do anything else. In doing so we will have proof of concept of the mechanism of disassembly vital for the work to come. All galaxies spin (that we know of), they all have some kind of net angular momentum. But at the centre of a rotating cluster is not a solid, coherent collection of the same thing standing in static. This is a difference between reality and our perception of it: Everything is moving all of the time, it just looks to us like it is standing still from where we are standing sometimes. We will come up against this many times: Separating reality, the whole story, out from the short-hand explanation in our heads. It is the work much needed in this moment of our growth as a species.

The technological and psychological revolutions of the last several centuries have fundamentally altered the way we understand more things than a single person can appreciate. Old wisdom is helpful but it wasn’t written with the explicit knowledge we now possess. And yes there are many examples reaching into pre-history where philosophers and artists and everyone in between were able to give a pretty good account which matches what we now know. But there is a disconnect between this place we now are and what has come before. The last century’s way of doing things is no longer fit for purpose. We cannot go on denying the things we have observed about the operations of the world. We have looked into the sub-atomic interactions defining the momentum of reality and we have looked into the expanse of the universe beyond this planet and we have looked into the vast landscape of human imagination and now we can say with enough certainty what is and isn’t happening. Now we must begin to imagine new ways forward that work from what we have recently learned– We must accept the rapid transformation of consciousness that is already underway. We must rise to meet reality to gain the paths ahead of us.

Because even the concept of a centre is only locally, contextually, a true thing. There are centres swirling around each other – look at the complexity of competing vortices in a fast-flowing river. Much work has been done to examine the stories we tell ourselves as cultures and communities and individuals. Now is the time for new stories that better reflect the reality we must acknowledge exists.

The celestial bodies each have their own trajectory – Coincidental forces rather than a discrete operation. Really I am saying that there are a multitude of forces acting upon bodies moving through space – Never just one. What I am really saying is that what Copernicus taught (or at least, what we learned from Copernicus) was a reframing of a single story to another single story. We now understand that there was never a single story – That in fact competing and complimentary and disinterested forces acting chaotically conveniently combine to create (enough) coherence to derive meaning from those forces. With the knowledge available at the time we do our best to create helpful metaphors to describe the world. It is easier to imagine the world is holding itself together neatly rather than barely holding together in spite of entropy.

It is not a mistake to recognise a cluster in the middle as being coherent – We can talk about the heart of things. But do not forget the heart itself is not located perfectly in the centre of our bodies. It is located in an asymmetrical system. And while local symmetry might achieve it’s aim, if you zoom in or out eventually the symmetry will collapse back into asymmetry. I am saying that symmetry is explicitly finite, surrounded by the potential for asymmetry. This is not a binary distinction though it looks it: Asymmetry is merely the absence of symmetry. Anything can be asymmetrical since it just whatever is not symmetrical. This asymmetry can be collated with the vision that chaos, not order, is the majorative nature of all things. We are here in spite of (and because of) the chaos of the universe. We are here by accident, not through intention. But we will get to disassembling that later.

So what I am trying to say is this: We make fundamental misassumptions about the way things are in the world and then we live our lives mirroring that misassumption. Because the lessons of Copernicus do not just apply in our everyday lives to the trajectory of celestial bodies but in fact echo a central metaphor within our cultural consciousness. I am arguing that we disassemble that old story and tell the story again knowing what we now know. Once we have retold the story we must live by it like we did the old one, however, the additional difference is remembering that this story will not serve us forever and is only meant to get us just so far as we need it to. For now, that is out of the orbit of old ideas and onto a trajectory that takes us somewhere new. Yes we may shoot off beyond the suns warm embrace, yes we may collapse into the realms of too much heat. But in order to survive, some very big things need to move quickly to keep up that have moved slowly for a long time.

So I am saying this: We can still consider the celestial system as a helpful moment where external reality resembles our internal landscape. It is a sympathetic metaphor that suggests consistencies with our experience. But when you think of the Earth orbiting around the sun see the lie we have lived by to keep ourselves safe: No single thing has ever, or will ever, sit at the centre of existence. Everywhere is multiplicity and polyphony and many things colliding and separating and missing each other at once. This is a shift away from a binary understanding – It is not the battle between good and evil, light and dark, joy and suffering that we should be concerning ourselves with. The battle is between ways of thinking that try to reduce complexity to singular truths and ways of thinking that understand the complicated twists and turns of our ever-changing universe. Everything is moving all of the time and no single state or idea or atom will always be one thing. Nothing is really ever just one thing – We lived enmeshed in context rich significance and co-incidence.

Really what I am saying is that there is no great centre to things with a clearly defined truth. The closest we would want to get to that ideas is to acknowledge the heart of something – an asymmetrical attempt at coming close together. In that heart, as in the world outside it, chaotic forces are colliding and rolling into and over each other while inside that chaos sympathetic and often simultaneous forces are also colliding and rolling into and over each other. Probably by now you understand and perhaps you already have known what I have said.

I am trying to say it as a clear line in one place but only getting close: Being, by which I mean the state of reality for all living and non-living things is a complex and chaotic dance. It is interacting on many different levels in many different ways. Some are complimentary, some competitive, others are chance encounters with uncertain outcomes. Our clear line of an idea is still going to wobble under the strain of decay. Something not quite right here, or a metaphor that is unclear over there. Maybe you got lost a little along the way: That is part of the nature of being. Nothing will ever be perfect because chaotic forces are acting from within and upon it. Nothing will ever be perfect because perfection is a human abstraction: it is a response to the observed phenomenon, not the phenomenon itself. It is an idea, only. I am starting to dismantle the ideas of perfection that hold us hostage because we do not see the mind forged manacles we ourselves have made in designing that idea. Perfect has its real world analogue in the sense that there can be enough of something not to need more of it. But like the Copernican model, our understanding is an oversimplification of the situation made to stop the need to keep thinking about it. If we were to dedicate ourselves to pulling on every thread that doesn’t quite make sense we would never get through the day.

When we disassemble a story made to express reality it will help us keep it disassembled if we can offer something else in its place. Hopefully the new story is more accurate, or more helpful, or more effective at translating the complexity of things into a knowable shape. There are a great many stories that have been forgotten or exiled that already do this: Hence the value of indigenous wisdom. But I am not indigenous, I have been de-cultured from a living relationship with the world around me by eons of technological and psychological development away from a way of being intrinsically tied to being itself. Initiated out of the animal cultures of the planet. We are no longer small apes, do not reside in Eden but have taken knowledge into ourselves and so we can only move forward to the home ahead. We cannot return to the home behind us.

When you look into the fire, look and you will see there is no one thing that is fire. Fire is the fuel and the heat and the light and the colours and the sounds and the smells and the danger and the thrill and the ancestors and the transformations and the ash and the feeling of warmth and the energetic momentum from one state to another and so on and on and on. Nothing is ever just one thing. Any thing is never just one thing. We live enmeshed in vectors and trajectories of orbiting celestial beings trying to come close and escape at the same time that sometimes don’t notice each other at all.

Inside the fire is a dance of all these things, both physical and metaphoric as we behold it. A tangential momentum of chaotic bodies. At the heart of our solar system is not the sun, the single idea of a light giving sphere. It is a dance, of sometimes successful protons and convergent decaying particles.

When Copernicus proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, he failed to teach us that that the sun is falling through the void and we are too. It is local logic that holds these things together, barely, and it is luck, not divine order, that means we are here at all. We are happy accidents expressed from the substrate of sub-atomic particles all moving and shaking in a chaotic dance at the heart of being. Sometimes it makes sense like a song or a story. Most of the time it is so much static and impotent fury meaning nothing whatsoever apart from what it is.

---

Welcome friends! Thanks for persevering through the canals, swamps and wide oceans of the web to seek me out.

There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.

Found the coin?