Facing Latency
Individuation
Individuation is a process of becoming whole. If you reflect on how compartmentalized your reality is and how fragemented your self is, how split you are from past and future, how culturally fixed we are, how separated we are from the natural movements of our bodies and the generative processes of the earth --- you can imagine how extraordinary it might be to “individuate.” Individuation is not like becoming an island unto oneself. But individuation is also not clinging to relationships. Individuation is beyond both the autonomous self and the self with belonging needs. There is a new kind of confidence that you are an ongoing process of the natural intelligence of the universe – a continuous unfolding of reality in the each present moment. The self is seen as latent – the emerging edge of the generative forces of the universe.
From which vantage point could you get behind your own latency?
When I taught the MA in Consciousness Studies and Transpersonal Psychology, I used to show the following clip from the movie Guess Who’s COming for Dinner. It tells the story of a black man and white woman who want to marry meeting each other’s parents. The clip begins with Sidney Poitier’s character arguing with his father, because his father doesn’t approve of bi-racial marriage.
What do you see ?
This is just the first layer of individuation. We must individuate from our parents. We must learn how to stand on our own two feet. The best parents, the best mentors, teach you how to stand on your own two feet. That’s the first iteration of individuation.
Because the self is seen as latency, as projecting into the future, the role of the person becomes shaping the self-generating process towards the future they would like to see. Individuation is a kind of shape-shifting, or transmutation process. You don’t stay put, because you are always en-forming and in-forming.
This has little to do with “progress” as modern people think of it. It has to do with dynamic rhythms and universal tempos --- we come and go, and we are coming and going at the same time. You are both: as flux and flow.
The New Human
Do you want to be software?
There is something in the Zeitgeist of modern humans that wants to transform into … some thing else. Here is one techno-future option that is being pushed by many powerful tech giants, and being pursued by many others.
There may be one or more branches waiting to appear in human evolution. That is the nature of latency at the macroscale. There may be a major extinction ahead, totally eliminating “our branch of the tree.” But we still unfold from the deeper universals --- our shared genealogy which is represented by the trunk of the evolutionary tree. What happens when we understand this more completely?
This is not a problem of “who am I becoming?” but a question of “who are we becoming” and, given that context, “who can I be?” … It is a matter of coming to face latency directly, in the eyes of the others, human and non-human.
What do you see?
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