A Concise Description of Responsive Naturing

All Natural Things Are Alive; All Natural Things Are Responsively Natured; Fate Is Where Each Starts Now

Grace, or in my lexicon, concern, is the fundamental aspect of what I call Responsive Naturing. It manifests as a creativity at play in what response comes to everything we do. All responses are constrained by the evident coherent continuity in every moment, but there is wiggle room in which a certain creativity is discernible.

In order to answer this question in more depth, I need to review what the salient aspects of the paradigm of Responsive Naturing are:

In this paradigm, every natural thing is a living being with an ontogenetic form that defines the potential of that being’s development.

Another way to say this is that every actual ontogenetic form is a living being.

The difference between those two sentences is where YOU are standing: amongst the living beings, so that you look to the ontogenetic form as the intelligibility of each being’s nature; or from the perspective of the informing of the ontogenetic form, in which case you look at the living being as the epiphanic appearance of this ontogenetic informing — “this,” referring to the Here where ‘your’ perspective ‘originates’ from. This is a nondual perspective in which the naturing and the recognition of the act of naturing — not the product of it — are not two things .

In neither case is your perspective moved. It’s like a Necker’s Cube — one moment it appears one way, the next moment it can appear another way, but it takes time to work out how to create the condition for it to appear the other way. This refers to the apperception of the nondual recognition of the activity of naturing, or informing — I prefer to use the word informing, rather than manifesting or arising, etc., because it’s original, although obsolete, 14th century meaning is “to give material form to,” as well as “to make known.” This meaning is perfect for what I want to say, so I have resurrected it from obsolescence.

In both cases, the ontogenetic form is not a thing — it is a performative structuring ability. We don’t have a specific word for this kind of ability, so we could just call it creativity, or better yet, creating, since this ability is on the other side of the naturing of all natural things (i.e., beings).

However, I refer to that side as “that of which nothing can be truly said.” And the limen of intelligibility between is what I call the ‘event-horizon’.

For me, since we can’t truly say anything about what is on the other side of that event-horizon — or even that there is another side — I prefer to stay silent.

So to continue, what informs the ontogenetic form is what I call the sæculum, which is the sentient, but impersonal, responsive naturing of that ontogenetic form. The sæculum presents as attention, because, as is obvious from our own lives, as our attention ‘turns’ or ‘focuses’ on something, it is animadverted.

It seems like attention should be personal, because we think of it — in the case of ‘our’ attention — as our own, but this is a confusion of certain ‘clues’ in our experiences that are misleading. I will skip over this point, but you can read my explanation for it here: “Why We Continue To Be Confused About Consciousness.”

Thus, the sæculum is both the activity of naturing the ontogenetic form, as well as its potential life (span). Why? Because sentience is known duration, so that duration, and therefore the hypostatized entity we call ‘time,’ is ‘being aware’, in the case of known duration, and ‘awareness’ is the hypostatized conception of ‘time’ — which doesn’t veridically exist. For a comprehensive discussion of this, please read: “Why Awareness Will Never Be Found.”

Note that there is no independent self-nature. This naturing is omni-intrinsic (omnintrinsic). Think waves on an ocean as being the sæcula, and the ocean being the totality of all sæcula.

It appears to be the case that each being is independent of all others, but other than accidental and ephemeral qualities, there is nothing that sets it apart from all other beings — except for the perspective, a.k.a., the attentional focus, and that is impersonal, not subjective because there is no subject. The subjectivity is the accidental and ephemeral qualities discernible Now, becoming entangled with the perspective that originates as if standing amongst the formed beings.

What is the actual ‘raw material’ involved here? Sæcula. Every complex being is comprised of a sæculum that is entangled in a structured way with sæcula, and each of those sæcula is entangled in a structured way with more sæcula, until a root node sæculum is reached. I call this a deeply-nested and recursive organic structure of other ontogenetic forms. See: “On The Origin Of Complex Life.”

So we have:

Ontogenetic forms that are natured by a sæculum, which has an attentional focus as it informs the ontogenetic form’s potential.

The potential is fixed in the actual inform-ation presenting Now, which you can call the being’s fate, or karma. Fate is were the being starts from — in every moment of its life.

The informing by the sæculum is responsive to what the ontogenetic form’s fate is at each moment, taking into account what part of that potential is possible Now, given the current context of that and all other sæcula that are entangled together in that moment — the constraint being that in each moment what is natured is coherently continuous with that fate and is possible given the context. The attentional focus is modified by intention and desire, and it ‘boosts’ certain possibilities in the current context over others — remembering that all the entangled sæcula are attentive in some way that is limited by the potential of the sæculum’s ontogenetic form.

But one more thing: when a sæculum dies, its constituent sæcula continue or die depending upon each sæculum’s fate. Dying means becoming unentangled from the prior entangled sæculum or sæcula, thus becoming matter. Any collection or heap of unentangled sæcula are matter to each other. Because a sæculum is what ‘energizes’ an ontogenetic form, you can think of it as a form of energy, either potential or actual.

That energy is ultimately just a wave on the ocean, and the ocean is on the other side of that event-horizon, that is, that of which nothing can be truly said — the cloud of unknowing of mystics. However, matter can interact in physical ways, and can even become entangled with each other. How all that works is fixed on the other side, while the interactions and entanglements can be — and are experienced via our senses, whether a cloud of dust, or a community of humans, other animals, plants, fungus, bacteria, and photon of light.

All natural things are alive. All natural things are responsively natured. The cares and concerns, interests and intentions, and desires of complex beings are considered.

But even then, there can be just a bit of creativity that is unaccounted for, and which makes all the difference between a life and a calculation.

All of the above words and structure originates in contemplative and meditative insights. It is all attested to, in various ways — most often poetically — in wisdom traditions too. Often times, what I have described above in an impersonal way, is personalized as avatars, which are ways to remember what this all means. And usually, it is described with awe, with adumbrations of beauty and bliss, while in transverberated states. Examples of avatars are: Kuan Yin the avatar of Great Responsiveness in Buddhism, Apollo the avatar of nonduality in Ancient Greek culture, Shiva, Shakti, etc. So why is my description so unlike that?

The answer to this is the answer to the question, “What are the challenges to instantiating this paradigm?”

In my life there has been four ‘unions with the Divine’ — with that of which nothing can be truly said. Four times when the achingly beautiful absolute perfection of this has overwhelmed (me) — transverberated (me) — as if on the cusp of an orgasm of infinite unending proportions… four times is a lot during a single life.

But I have a ‘mission’ to accomplish today, in this world, and it isn’t to once again write a body of inspiring beautiful poetry, while Ignorance forges ahead. Because today the majority of people have no room in their hearts for such nonsense — and scientists, or at least the imposed environment that scientists have to operate in, is the worst. To an ontological materialist, whose only ‘god’ is the promise of future material explanations for all things, there is no room for the nonmaterial — for the achingly beautiful, and the absolute perfection that has no matter in its ‘explanation’. So, I have left this paradigm without a ‘head’, so that scientists will not cower in self-disgust for entertaining it.