Notes on the Rhizome and Re-Thinking Emergence
What if we could embody a different relationship with time? If we took other images from our world – spirals, zig-zags, rhizomes, crystals, the folds of a midnight flower, the pulsing undulations of the jellyfish – and allowed our narratives of becoming and transformation (personal or otherwise) to follow those contours and weaves, those meta patterns?
What if we didn’t need the narrative of progress or sequence to imagine the complex processes of cultural unfoldment or emergence?
What other tools, myths, and voices would then come forward?
The first few sessions follow the path of the rhizome and root as an inspired image, both as metaphor and conceptual toolkit to begin sensing, imaging, and thinking with time. I will be playfully suggesting a new “history” of consciousness unfoldment, i.e., thinking less linearly — progressively — about the narrative, what then becomes of the story of human emergence?
I suggest that something quite radical, as in rad (“root”) occurs, a re-visioning of consciousness unfoldment more appropriate for complex, planetary, ecological thinking and being. More reflective of the supposed integral consciousness structure that many scholars in my field have described emerging in our present civilizational crisis. We are then better situated to ask: how do we lean into this new consciousness, learn to body it forth in our daily lives, our praxis, our culture? Become like emissaries from an integral future?
Radiant Body of Time, Mutations, Jeremy D Johnson
