I was watching a piece of fluff floating down from the sky in the bright afternoon sun. The shadow was on the ground, far away, but as the fluff floated down, it eventually met the shadow on the cement.

And I was thinking about the ideas presented in Owen Barfield’s SAVING THE APPEARANCES, but also about representational cognition in general… and the TREE STORY in Genesis.

Owen proposes a 3-branch model of human cognition. Figuration, he proposes, is the process of recognition (of distinct, things, beings, relationships, qualities and processes) that derives its produce from COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS. These are names, models, concepts and verbal tags for differentiable aspects of our perception. Alpha-Thinking is thinking in and about the representations and their relations to and with each other. Beta-Thinking is reflecting on the activities of the mind (as we are doing here). Particularly thinking about cognition in general, or mental activities.

He proposes something called Original Participation (by which he means the experience of ancients and ‘primitives’ prior to the domination of alpha-thinking). OP is natural to children and indigenous cultures and rather than being animistic (as our modern alpha-thinking supposes) is synthetic wholism.

The primary purpose of alpha-thinking today is to evict participation, and imagine a world without it, in which all events and identities are seen as existing separately and without participation. This is the goal, for example, of science.

And it struck me as I watched the floating fluff, and its shadow, that what we are taught to do with our minds in modern societies ( rationality – literally – fractioning ) has as its goal the total eviction of participation from thought and imagination. And this, I think is the problem in Genesis. The possibility of departing from original participation ( natural for all organisms, but especially animals ), into dead representations. This is what is meant, I suspect, by the divine being’s admonition to refrain from eating of ‘the tree in the midst of the garden’ ( in Hebrew, midst is derived from TAVEK, which means ‘to put apart’ or ‘to divide’. I.e. our umblicus, where we were separated from our mother) because ‘it is death’. And it is, similarly, what is meant, when, in conversation with the Serpent (i.e. one who divides the earth merely by existing or passing over it) when it claims ‘you will not actually die’.

As I watched the fluff approach and, finally, unify with its shadow, I realized that our alpha-thinking is dead inside. It is the shadow of knowledge-as-intimacy-in-relation, that becomes the uninhabitable abstractions that derive their power over us from both popularity ( thus the ‘collective’ in collective representations) and their apparent utility ( utilization rather than relation is the driving motive in our collective representations).

And I thought: our collective representations are lethal, as in both deadly ( to our interiority ) and evictive ( there’s no place in them for beings-in-relation). And so both things are true. They are deadly, but do not kill our bodies immediately. Rather, they crush the imagination, the heart, the soul, and the spirit.