What is Way-making?
Way-making is a term inspired by Taoism that can be understood as the movement of the body as well as the movement of the mind: “Way-making blunts the sharp edges and untangles the knots; it softens the glare and brings things together on the same track.” (Ames and Hall, 2003 in Boulton, 2024).
This framing seeks to link the work of many who are rethinking the dualistic views that influence our actions, relationships, and fields of study. My writing and research explores how we might understand consciousness as life, and our consciousness of that consciousness (our consciousness of our life, and ourselves as part of life) as the action of orientation, a steering activity that comes with great sensuality and responsibility. This can be the ways we make through our city, or the ways we make through our own feelings and thoughts. As my more academic work shows through research relative to the hippocampus, we are now at a moment where we can hold the paradox of mind and movement in common process. In so doing, we also discover new dimensions of what is possible for us as societies and selves.
This Substack comes in a spirit of community, hoping to find ways to make this rather academic and esoteric ideas into something that can be understood and grown across the usual divides. I hope we can grow philosophy together.
Everywhere we look now there are captions telling us they have the answers. Instead of pretending there is any one answer, I am hoping we can find the answers together and let those answers grow and live and change as living systems.
My goal is to listen and learn, to study and notice the patterns as best I can, and to communicate, create, and share in service to love, health, critical thinking and sensual presence. As a community of discussion, we can build better ways together, expand our senses, experience joint presence, and discover a new ecological space towards helping one another with our individual and community challenges.
What really matters in this life? How do meaningful philosophical and scientific pursuits change how we experience the world? How do the ways we frame our experience (whether consciously or not) become the ways we make in it, or the ways that make future generations?
As these writings sketch and illustrate the philosophy of way-making, a work in progress, and ask for your participation in showing me what I might have missed or what I can improve or how it would be more relevant to your own work and life.
Thank you for being here, and I look forward to your perspective!
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You can find much more relative to these themes on the Love & Philosophy research channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@waymaking23
And associated posts relative to those conversations on the Love & Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy Substack at:
Hippocampus Love is a subsection of the above, to be found at: https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/s/hippocampus-love
