by Mordon.
I have recently devoured the Dramatic Universe series in a yearning for understanding what is really going on in this field. Here, I return to the campfire with stories and testimonies from my searchings. This is just one person’s testimony, so don’t take anything I say as truth – I am only an apprentice in this work. But I hope it might inspire you to take your own quests and dives.
Knowledge and Understanding
What I’ve come to see recently is that the world we learn about is dominated by one particular mode of knowing, namely, the knowing of bytes of data – this house = made of stone, this dog = brown coloured, this place = called Britain. Science, universities, research are temples dedicated to this mode of knowing. Nevertheless, we see all around us the effect of this domination: in an interconnected world, a disconnecting mode of knowing is having dangerous consequences.
However what I’ve become conscious of through this school is another way of knowing; its one I have experienced my whole life, though I have not been totally conscious of it, nor how it really works, nor previously been given the language or structures to understand it. Rather than being knowledge of the things themselves, this way of knowing is of the relationships between those things instead. Bennett in the Dramatic Universe series calls this “understanding” as contrasted with “knowledge” – a synthetic mode rather than analytic, one that can grasp wholeness and complexity without reducing it to simple parts.
Importantly, Bennett contrasts the qualities of communicability and transferability of these two ways of knowing. Knowledge, he says, is communicable through language, but is not transferable. For example, one can easily communicate to another through language that this business sells apples, but knowing that doesn’t help you know what other businesses do. Conversely, understanding is transferable but not communicable. Once you understand how business works as a whole, you can apply that to lots of businesses. Cultural stories point to its transferable nature in “once you see it, you see it everywhere” and “you can’t unsee it”.
However, attempts to explain how business works in words has filled millions of pages. For those who really appreciate the quality of understanding, it’s often found to be totally ineffable and transmission requires, in the words of the Zen tradition, “a finger pointing at the moon”. This difficulty or impossibility of communicability leads to a sense of randomness or an accidental nature to the development of understanding, and shows up in cultural stories like “when the penny drops” or “when it clicks into place”. We also experience that we cannot just transfer our understanding to another – it is a process that needs to “click” in each person. Education, therefore, usually centers around the transmission of communicable knowledge, hoping that the accumulation of enough facts and the application of a certain type of effort will create understanding. Those who have a natural capacity to understand (or it has been developed elsewhere) excel, while those who cannot intuitively connect the dots for themselves are left behind.
As we can see by its presence in our cultural stories, it’s not that this mode of knowing is unknown. Sometimes it goes by “intuition”, and other times as “wisdom”. An expert doctor can intuit the relationships between symptoms, where a junior one relies on a more deliberate process of consulting their memory bank of facts. So too can a wise doctor discern when a course of treatment that appears called for “by the book” is actually going to be counterproductive, without necessarily being able to explain that in words. For the most part, professions like medicine recognise that wisdom is not just an accumulation of experience, but requires reflection on experience too.
However, that is far from a universally accepted truth. And without a rigorous understanding of how it works or how it can be developed, its value to the world has been at best overlooked, and at worst, purposefully undermined. Prior to coming to Systematics via the Regenesis School, I certainly had never experienced a pedagogy where this capacity was thoroughly understood and consciously developed in me.
The Role of Symbols
The lack of communicability exerts limits on the transmission of understanding; we cannot simply tell someone in words how to understand something. But communciation through words is not the only way. This is the role of symbols as instruments of transmission of understanding. The Systematics school has developed a number of practical symbols that we call “Frameworks” that helps us communicate understanding, and a pedagogy that uses these tools to help us see these insights and ultimately wisdom for ourselves in a deliberate way. All symbols can be useful in this regard, but the power of the contribution of Systematics in the field of symbology is the rigorous nature of its symbology, rooted in mathematics as much as in intuition. This rigorousness can be examined across three dimensions: Quantity, Quality and Magnitude.
Quantity: Order of Wholeness
Humans can easily come to understand the relationship between any two “mutually relevant” things or “terms”. More difficult however is to begin understand the mutual interrelationship between three things. This is not the same as understanding the dual relationship between three things which is what our two-term mind often thinks is three-ness (i.e. A-B, B-C, A-C), but three at the same time (i.e. A-B-C). At another “order of wholeness”, we can work at four terms (A-B-C-D), and so on and so forth.
In this way, we can quantify “understanding” in a conscious and rigorous way, depending on the number of terms that have been included. On a recent public call with Anthony Blake, a close student of Bennett, he explained how Systematics can also be understood in the opposite direction – that of dividing a whole into two parts, three parts, four parts and so on, and to seek to understanding the consistent patterns that appear when dividing seemingly unrelated wholes into four. This is the same thing just looked at from the other side.
Quality: Systemic Properties
But Systematics is not limited to a quantitative dimension. When one works rigorously and consistently on two-, three-, four- term thinking, one discovers that behind all structural manifestations of a certain number of relationships is a quality or “systemic property”. For example, the systemic property that underpins relationships of two is polarity; of three, dynamism; and of four, activity.
None of this is divine revelation. This is all out in the open for you to test in your own experience. Is it true that these are the qualities that underpin these numbers? Indeed, especially at the higher numbers (5+), Bennett’s description of his sense of the systemic property showed evidence of evolution through his life.
Magnitude: Strength of Terms
One final dimension by which we understand Systematics is that of strength of mutual relevance. We can take any four things to form our four terms of a Tetrad – for example, a slice of bread in my house, a dog in Cambodia, a butterfly beating its wings in the rainforest and the weather in France. These are four valid, mutually relevant terms (as we know from Chaos Theory) but their relevance is so subtle that it is both probably beyond human comprehension and ultimately, not that useful to us. This isn’t an incorrect Tetrad, there is no such thing, but we could instead call this a “weak Tetrad” (learning about this dimension of systematics has helped me let go of perfectionism in Systematics).
Far stronger and, most importantly, useful, are the four main ingredients of bread: flour, water, yeast and salt. But Bennett and his students found we can go further still. To help us really tap into the core of each framework, he suggested generic term characters (at least for the first six orders of wholeness), for example:
2: Fact <–> Value
3: Activating, Restraining and Reconciling Force
4: Ground, Instrument, Direction, Goal
But we are not limited to these terms. There are other suggested (but related) terms characters that help us see other more specific relationships, such as:
2: Existence & Essence
3: Will, Being & Function
4: Place-Sourced Potential, Regenerative Goals, Vocation of Place and Co-Evolving Mutualism.
These are all just instruments to help us develop terms that are both strong in the relevance and in their value to our lives. Because remember, it is not the terms themselves that are being transmitted, but the relationships between them. Importantly, this is the difference between a Tetrad and a four part shopping list.
The Value of Systematics
We can see how Systematics transforms something that is commonly percieved as an accidental, random, unintelligible mode of knowing into one that is rigorous, understandable and subject to development through the conscious and rigorous use of symbols.
Finally, toward what end are these new capacities put? A diversity of ends are available and emerges from the way each particular school of Systematics, in our case, the Regenesis School, applies Systematics. For us, this isn’t just about growing understanding just for a curiosity or an individual spiritual journey (not that this is the case for other schools either), but our “so that” entails threads like growing consciousness and conscientiousness, showing up in a higher order role with respect to our work in the living systems in which we inhabit, and the inner development that enables that, and growing fields of mutual care and reciprocity.
What happens when wisdom is something we can consciously inculcate, rather than lead to chance? And doesn’t the world, swimming in more knowledge than we’ve ever had, need more wisdom to make sense of it.
It’s important to me that this is read as just one man’s testimony, in the spirit of both the Regenerative and the Quaker traditions. However, reading things like this does tend to generate thinking and counter-thinking – which instead of incorporating or resisting, I’d instead love to capture and collate. So, instead of feedback or reflections (though that’s cool too), I invite your own testimony, while holding in mind potential for a book about our Work based on collated testimonies from lineage practitioners rather than the doctrine of an “expert” in the field (see Quaker Faith & Practice for what this could look like). If reading this post stimulates thinking and you’d like to send me your testimony, you can use this form