Total Nature

Scriabin I understand had a concept of the Total Art Work - the combination of all art forms as a way of expressing the underlying Art. Identically isn't there a concept of Total Nature?

Nature from the urban perspective is a fringe peripheral entity. It is contained and entertained in a defined and limited form but we can escape it into the Human realities of literature, politics, economics essential society.

I've been developing a skeptical approach to the real significance of Society in the past few months and on the walk this enabled me to view with greater clarity a notion of Nature as an all encompassing framework upon which Mankind performs his works. Intellectually I've known this must be true, but it is hard to see when we are so brain washed by the hegemonic position of Mankind being the originator and foundation of Reality.

On this walking holiday for the first time I experimented with eating wild foods. This as Richard Mabey argues in the introduction is a great way to participate in nature. I also had binoculars to engage with the bird life properly for the first time. I've developed an old interest with insects to engage at that level also, I can add a deeper understanding of geology to that, and a growing understanding of weather.

Combine all this with my current developments in understanding Man's place in the world and the light of a "Total Nature" conception begins to shine.

Importantly this is not a "back to the trees" concept. It is simply an awareness of Truth, what Really exists in our Life. Understanding our place in the world is surely the most important thing for a Man before even he thinks about his own life. Failure to understand one's place and one fails to understand what one is.

Nature I maintain is something that we are intimately involved with on both the huge scale in terms of our planet, but also on the micro-scale in terms of the bacteria and chemistry of our own bodies. It is there in the weather, in the air, in the water, in the food, in the light, in every place. In thsi way the Truth manifests itself in so many forms that one cannot comprehend the Truth by looking at only one aspect. You cannot just be interested in ecology, or biology, geology, physics, chemistry, meteorology, agriculture etc and think that this is Nature - rather they are all required to glimpse what is a much deeper and fundamental conception.

A walk in the countryside is not a trivial pass time dictated by rights-of-way and the time allocated by an economic view it is an opportunity to involve oneself on all levels with the profound Reality that has been termed Nature.

By no means have I made any real transformation in my life, and by no means resolved a complete argument yet, but I've new confidenec in this approach that it really is better than the Hegemony.

Economy is rather in the news these days. It is interesting to note that there is no discontinuity in Nature at this time which I am aware of, and that the economic shift is entirely artificial and illusory! The fundamentals are still there: Crops are still growing and mouths still need feeding, yet the Human distribution system seems to have collapsed. Do we really need this distribution system? Many attempts have been made to re-engineer it, and with disasterous consequences. But they all fail it seems to me because they are not expressions of Total Nature, which is the only Reality.

The proof of this concept would I imagine be a fix of the economic distribution rules. But, I already know that the solution is going to be too radical for people to accept in my life time, if ever. Concepts like property and labour will be shown to be misunderstandings!

Charles Handy is the only person working in this direction that I know of. I should familiarise myself with his works. In particular an interesting statistic he produced was a trend in working hours. He placed agrarian working hours at around 20hours/week I remember. In my own life time we have seen working hours increasing. This seems counter-intuitive given techynological progress but it is a direct product not of Nature but of the economic system. We can only afford all the things we make if we work - so the loop is set up and a growing economy means endless more work. "Growing economy" is, I suspect, another error, but there is a vast wealth of doctrin behind (or more accurately generated by) this. I've discussed much already in the blog primarily that growing economy and consumerism is foolish in a world already facing limiting resources and ecological crisis.

Property is the most shakey but the hardest concept to investigate because it is so fundamental to our world view. Clearly it is illusory (taking the notion of illusion developed in this blog: that an illusion is something we believe without any evidence). If I purchase an apple then it becomes mine. Yet I would challenge anyone to show me the difference between an apple that is mine and one that is not mine. They are the same. Property does not exist in the world, it is a rule of the game, it could be otherwise, it is not Truth and it is not Real. So we are in game theory - this is where is gets complex and I've not been able to get through the maze yet. Astonishing however that John Locke's work is still (I believe) taken seriously when to my mind it falls apart so readily.

So "Total Nature" is the combined works and motives of Man that generate from and aim towards an understanding and appreciation of this most vast and profound Truth which underlies all extant things.