This is The Apocrypha, a newsletter about my process of writing, possibly a book, maybe recording a podcast, and beginning an art practice, transitioning from the career I began in 1988 as a designer, as I explore the world of intuition, intention, imagination, inspiration, and integration.
The original meaning of apocrypha has been co-opted by the authorities to mean something that is the opposite of its intended meaning and purpose. According to the Wikipedia entry on the meaning of apocrypha,
Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. The word apocryphal (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated. Apocrypha was later applied to writings that were hidden not because of their divinity but because of their questionable value to the church. In general use, the word apocrypha has come to mean “false, spurious, bad, or heretical.”
Apocrypha is a word that I have come to understand as the world of intuition, intention, imagination, inspiration, and integration.
This is the world of transcendence, beyond the authorized version of the story. When the authorities apply their editorial process to a subject, something gets lost in translation. Inevitably, something is removed, modified, distorted, and possibly even falsified in the final version that gets published as safe and appropriate for public consumption.
This is usually what happens to children when they are put through the editorial process of the education system. As Sir Ken Robinson observed, the industrial model of education often removes the creative capacity of the child.
All young children begin in life as artists. By the time they graduate from school, few artists survive the indoctrination of our modern education systems.
All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.
— Buckminster Fuller
Jesse James Garrett describes human experience in his talk on Design for Engagement as a combination of perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body).
At the end of 2019, I was inspired by the Bauhaus and the intention of their architecture program to first understand the materials they were working with in order to find new ways of building. I expanded on the idea of understanding our materials as designers to explore ways of perceiving and sensing and understanding that transcend the colonial, industrial, and exploitative tools of the public relations, communications, marketing, advertising, and design industries, in which the persona is assumed to be a representation of a stakeholder of a business process or an individual in a target market. User experience design tends to assume a human-centred design perspective that determines success on the intersection of the desirable (human), feasible (technology), and viable (business).
As a result of this anthropocentrism, humans have brought about the Anthropocene. This moment is a convergence of multiple crises, from the physical and the biological to the social, economic, political, technological, ecological, and metaphysical.
In transcending human-centred design and the assumption that human beings are users of products designed to fulfill the profit-seeking enterprises of transnational corporations, I wondered if there was a way to find a life-centred approach to design, beginning with mental models for human experience to go beyond the constraints of the persona as a tool for empathic research.
Sophie Strand offers an alternative perspective by asking some questions in her recently released book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.
But what if the world wasn’t dead matter after all? What if, under the sloppy paint job of materialism and rationalism, the animate world was just asleep? Let us try to write a new Quest. A quest that surfaces in the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty.
What can we learn from fairy tales and fairy-tale analysis? Fairy tales are a form of oral literature. In the nineteenth century the Grimm brothers collected tales from storytellers and set them to text. Likewise, seventeenth-century French author Charles Perrault, and even arguably Shakespeare, took well-known stories and set them to parchment.3 They took breath-ensouled words, smoke-clotted voices, and gesturing hands and turned them into flat pages. This transformation isn’t necessarily negative. At least the stories were preserved and widely shared. But it is important to remember that fairy tales were originally fluid, living narrative beings that changed to suit different ecosystems and social scenarios. A written text is more permanent, but it has a much harder time evolving. As Karen Armstrong explains in The Lost Art of Scripture, stories were originally somatic, lived, ritualized events rather than static, written objects. It was widely acknowledged that they would have to be updated constantly to suit the unique needs of a historical moment.
It is in this moment of multiple systemic crises that we are realizing our frame of reference did not allow for a full understanding of the whole sphere of reality. The literal perspective of the Renaissance and Enlightenment frames assumed an objective observer outside of the reality they attempted to represent. But that reality was frozen in space and time, flat and static, outside of the complex dimensionality of the universe, the spiralling motion and the curving gravitational relationships of the spheres, the subjective sensorial experience of physical embodiment, and the flow of consciousness.
The assumption of a singular authoritative and objective perspective has enforced monotheism and monoculture through brute force in the form of a global, secular, social, economic, and political order that tends to exclude complexity, diversity, and creativity in exchange for familiarity, homogeneity, and security.
What have we lost? We are in collective grief and trauma over this visceral experience of the losses we have suffered amidst the past, current, and looming crises.
To restore, repair, and regenerate, we are finding ways to slow down, rest, and heal. In this way, we are realizing that Earth regenerates when we stop our anxious striving.
What we have left out of the human project is our ability to share and to care. We focused so much on the individual that we forgot that individual integrity is entirely dependent on collective integrity, that life and love are about synergy and syntropy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And the wholeness of love is expressed in a myriad of ways.
By adding integrity as collective integration, or what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing, we have the four vertexes of Jesse James Garrett’s understanding of human experience spinning in the universal structure of a tetrahedron around the centre of the collective consciousness to include every connection and interaction in the network that forms the whole sphere of reality.
intuition (perception/senses)
intention (cognition/mind)
imagination (emotion/heart)
inspiration (action/body)
integration (connection/community/consciousness/grace)
This is a physical, metaphysical, and pataphysical reality in which we are co-creating the future from the emergent possibilities of the here and now. Consider human experience as a collective narrative and speculative fiction writing project, in which the past provides the materials for the creative possibilities of the here and now to realize new visions of the emergent future.
Everything is impermanence. The only constant is change. Welcome to The Apocrypha, the world of intuition, intention, imagination, inspiration, and integration. This is where we are coming back to our senses, remembering the sense of belonging, community, and love that we have lost, while learning new senses to collectively navigate metaphysical gravity.