Quantum Cloud by Antony Gormley
In the sculpture Quantum Cloud, which is situated in the river Thames in London, Antony Gormley beautifully captures the in-between state where we can witness the “possibility” of a body in a state of emergence - existing between what Bohm called the implicate and explicate order.
Like the sculpture, we are all atmospheres, spheres of livingness, or said in yet another way, we are fields of atoms (atmo-spheres) continually coming into and out of existence. As we engage with one another in partnered-practices (also called WeSpace practices, partnered-meditation, shared-practices), we are engaging with the “betweenness,” we are exchanging and “visibilizing” the relational matrix of which we are all a part.
Franz Marc, a German artist, said “More and more I am beginning to see behind or better: through things.” In this sculpture, and through partnered-practices, we begin to see how this is possible.
The We ONEing community, which I co-steward, is an atmosphere made up of multiple atmospheres just as any community is. When we engage in partnered-practices as we do in TWO, we experience ourselves as processes (processual) not fixed. Like the Quantum Cloud sculpture, we humans are open, not closed systems. Simultaneously, we make up a whole community, and we are each whole-parts ourselves, in continuous exchange.
So, are we each implicate or explicate? Are we implicate and explicate? Perhaps we are either/and, the betweenness itself, continually emerging into existence.
As we do shared-practices together, we are capacitizing ourselves and one another to catch glimpses of the transparent lucidity of which we are all a part - the wholeness, or oneness that reveals itself in the betweenness. Jean Gebser calls this the diaphaneity.
Together, we are also developing our capacity for unmediated knowing, our ability to know directly by being in and with what’s present. We are learning to go beyond our physical senses and use our entire atmosphere, our subtle sensory mechanisms, to sense, know, receive and give what’s needed for the next most beautiful relational moment to come into existence no matter where we are.
Let’s do an Active Imagination practice here. Sense yourself as an atmosphere, a quantum cloud. Notice your atmosphere - what’s happening? Do you sense yourself atomizing, opening, closing, infolding, enolding, in constant dynamism? Are there tangles, knots, tensions or occlusions in your field? What’s happening as you give your conscious attention to the atmosphere that you are?
Look around you. Let yourself “see” other people, plants, animals, objects as atmospheres. Choose one person or thing. Let your atmospheric-self be completely in and with the atmosphere of who/what you are engaging with. Know this person/object by being them. Notice the syncing-up, the flowing in and through, sense the information exchanging, feel the aliveness and the knowingness that comes in. What are you knowing? This kind of knowingness is beyond our minds. It is a direct knowing by being in and through one another unmediated by our thoughts, beliefs and reflections. Notice how this mode of perception doesn’t negate the manifest world, it fathoms it. It allows us to sense the depths, visibilizing the interior as well as the surfaces, all the way in and through.
Through this openness and spaciousness we can become aware of things that are latent in our fields/the field. We can begin to activate and bring forward what is needed. We can meet one another in the exchanging, in the inbetweeness. As we do this, we become more and more capable of co-enacting, of co-participating, with what creates the next most beautiful moment.
Interestingly, we’ve been discovering that a side effect of being in conscious shared-space with others is that we can regulate one another. We’ve been finding that we can be with our own and another’s triggering, activation, and trauma (incomplete energy patterns) by being with the active information flow (the intensity) as it moves through us. We are literally being with all that is rather than having to exclude any experiences. This is not an easy feat for us humans! We need one another to practice with. In giving ourselves to one another in our practices, we equip ourselves to be a conscious part of the larger whole.
If you’re curious about partnered-practices, you can find out more on Sacred Ground, where you’ll find information about Eternity in an Hour - The Sacred Ground Experience, Collective Presencing and Creative Presencing and on The We ONEing where you’ll find information about the partnered ONEing practices and WE App.