Adam Blatner

I have been corresponding with some acquaintances who in my estimate are really very bright, and I’m honored to be included in their circle. One Alan Rayner, is a retired professor of biology in England who evolved a theory of what he calls “Natural Inclusionality,” an approach that he thinks (and I agree in general) is needed today to move us into the better realms of post-post-modern thought.

Prof. Rayner—Alan—has been valiant in trying to express this mixture of compelling intuition and good reasoning, and in dialog (in which, I confess, I did not always make it easy for him), he has helped me to see a bit more fully what he’s been talking about.

Part of the problem has been trying to bridge two world-views: I discern a number of people pushing at the figurative membrane of the past, a more positivist philosophical base that is relatively more materialistic and objective. A number of other pioneers such as Gadamer, Whitehead, and others have challenged this, and in the 19th century this was in a sense the argument of the intellectuals who represented the Romantic movement—and now I am adding to this by arguing also from depth psychology—that what we call reality is significantly co-created by our minds and their world-views.

Rayner’s “Natural Inclusionality”  (or NI for short) ventures in many directions, noting the ways that compartments, definitions, are not only not as tight and crisp as we thought, but that they cannot be—that there are blurry overlaps in many dimensions and that’s the way it really is. His point is that we might cope with an increasingly rapidly changing world more effectively is we let go of the old, illusory world-view—though it served in many ways as a frame for making certain kinds of technical advances—and embracing a more fluid and open new worldview. I recommend his website http://www.inclusionality.org/ for further contemplation, and apologize in advance for failing to do justice to the fullness of his theories.