Ambiguity, orderliness, mysterioscope, otherwiseness, future sense are some of the figurative matters explicated in Part 1. Critical constructs synthesized from those include homeostatic self-remembering and universal heart. Part 2 constructs include memory crystal, soulful agency, sovereign symbolic structure. A set of simple relational matters inform those and later constructs. Those include behavior, tension, context, focus, direction, order, and orientation and are defined (figuratively) in the next and last section of the introduction: Orienting to OKIC. The faithful throughline, for you dear reader as singular bodily agent in a time of grand scale psycho-social reorientation, is confidence, connection, and responsibility informed by good, willing, valuable vision.
In the overall structure of the book, Part 1 is designated Compass. Part 2, Kaleidoscope. It is of course a bit of artifice to separate them, yet artifice is what humans require in order to make sense of abstractions. The underlying structure articulated in OKIC itself is context-free. This is the revolutionary part. Yet context-free is an odd kind of relating that most of us are not yet used to. So we’ll use metaphorical devices like compasses and exemplar devices like murder mysteries to communicate the artifices!
Life in its living is full of twists and turns. It is also, not coincidentally, full of decisions and ambiguities. A compass lends us a handy solution. Choose from either type: the compass that orients you to the cardinal directions - North, South, East, West - based the earth’s magnetic field, or the compass that allows you to draw perfect circles of any diameter as well as arcs, maybe even intersecting, of any length.
With each type, placement (your starting point or the point of whatever you are drawing) precedes direction, or diameter and stroke. What ultimately arises? Where you end up going or what you end up graphing, if not preordained, is essentially a meandering arising from a series of decisions. This hinges on understanding ambiguity as the driver of curious engagement, rather than the potentially culpable kind of ambiguity that is about hiding something or creating falseness to deceive.
The device relegated to Part 2, important to recognize at least in character from the start, is the kaleidoscope. An elongated circle housing free moving yet adjacent parts in a rotatable cylinder. The ends are transparent so that light can pass through. Small shards, beads and other displaceable items of categorically different colors, shapes, and transparency are enclosed within the cylinder.
Direct your gaze in one end of the device. Through the other, light enters, illuminating the dynamic, colorful parts and transmitting an image consistent with the complex interplay of light, space, and dynamic parts. A continual refreshing of the kaleidoscope’s internal pattern emerges as the cylinder is rotated. Play with a kaleidoscope and experience that the actual turning of the device in your hand facilitates a fascinating cascade of transformation, through strictly abstraction- and symmetry-infused imagery. A delight, and an important metaphor to examine when contemplating the nature of reality.
Think of this device and its display as representing the timeless cascade of representable patterns that a human observing without any ability to interfere with the mind can “see”. A visual display of pure relating as central to what gets represented. What is “representation” so important? As you will come to learn in starting in Chapter X, memory has qualities not unlike the inorganic process of crystallization. With the help of the mirror phenomenon, mentioned earlier in relation to I’m Okay. You’re Okay, our job from moment to moment include re-presenting information. This includes, at core, remembering, forgetting and then re-membering (through new [re] presentations) ourselves.
If only life’s twists and turns could feel so sublime! One goal of this book is to help individuals and organizations alike connect with deeper degrees of clarity about what is unfolding.
It would be a bonus were this book made every reader feel special, less confused, more empowered. It’s unfortunately unlikely. There’s simply no hope in an introductory piece like this to tiptoe around (or approach head on) everyone’s favorite reality construct. I would never get the point. Instead, I use an approach in OKIC that aims for people of all backgrounds, proclivities, cultures, preferences, the grounds to come into deeper understanding and potential synergies with people, organizations or entire fields that each would not normally be able to jive with. If you are dubious, because it sounds far-fetched (and *dirty words* woke or conspiratorial), I will not blame you for doubting, neither though do either of us need to let passing doubts sidetrack us.
As an individual, what I suggest is of baseline importance is that you come away understanding the value of meaningfully disambiguating, stopping working at cross-purposes with others and instead have cultivated a curiosity about if not ability to redirect and adjust to new possibilities. You can practice by interacting – in a sense mapping to OKIC’s timeless patterns – in the face your own life’s twists and turns, decisions and ambiguities. It requires this spark of curiosity: Given we have to co-exist, what can I understand differently about what things mean, not from a contrary position but from a receptive position? Receiving not as in the opinions of others. Receiving as in clarity. Clarity about what I or another is up to is showing me, or what this or that feature of the past or imagined future tells me about my “place in it all”? Clarity about how to stay more centered.
From there “the sky’s the limit.” Just ask any amateur astronomer. Instead of a telescope though, you’ll gaze, starting with the pages ahead, into a mysterioscope. And instead of calculating the paths and trajectories of planetary bodies, you’ll witness and integrate psycho-social centering and with that the ushering in of what it will take for humanity to finally co-create a future that makes sense. Heliocentrism ushered in not only awareness that the Earth revolve around a sun shared by other planets. It ushered in the savvy of devices that allowed humans to, over time, harness the uncertainty of the future as possibility. Revorelationalism (yes, it really is that awkward to express) unlocks the informational tools through which humanity can center itself, and in so doing, harness not just the possibilities but the generative capacity of individuals able to fully and uniquely engage the shared timeline that is humanity’s presence, right now, here on Earth.
Without a representational system like OKIC’s coming to bear, we face a future conspiring more than ever such that humanity fails to capitalize on its own generative capacities, relying instead solely, unsustainably on nature’s. This leaves humans to orient and navigate instead in the most ironic and self-absorbed ways possible: avoiding moral bankruptcy and avoiding semantic despair. As I examine in detail in Chapter X Rational Roulette, one way I characterize humanity’s current crises, multiple crash course timelines are actively being amplified by ongoing processes of re-presentation that are not relationally generative. And focusing on fixing pscho-social and socio-cultural problems in terms of morality and semantics (aka shaming and blaming) is not helping, but rather directly aggravating the issue. The real problem is collective aimlessness.