The Red Queen and the Garden of Potential
*This is the third of The Red Queen posts which I hope help explain the potential of networks. For it to make sense I would suggest reading the first and second posts.
In The Red Queen’s realm things are done differently.
It isn’t that all the things that exist in our world don’t exist there — they do! Our world and hers coexist simultaneously.
It is just that her dimension has different properties which effects how things are perceived there and how they behave.
- The Red Queen’s realm behaves like a networked reality of sorts. It sits beyond our idea of hyper-connected — everything ‘is’ connected to everything else.
- In her realm all boundaries are arbitrary — they do and don’t exist at the same time and a thing can be a part of many wholes or parts at once.
- Let’s not forget that The Red Queen is also the smartest person in the room — we don’t want to lose our heads!
The Red Queen and her realm go together hand in hand.
- Without the realms existence The Red Queen would not be able to perform her role in evolution. She must be in all places at once otherwise she could not guide us.
- Without The Red Queen the realm would exist as a wasteland, sitting alongside our world but entirely passive and without agency or purpose. Intelligent intervention is required in order for the realm to flourish.
In this post we are going to take a closer look at a lesson from the first post.
The Red Queen is an integral part of evolution.
In the Realm of the Red Queen our world is her garden — it is a natural and developmental ecosystem.
A World of Our Creation
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep
-William Blake, 1802
We see everything in our world as being separate. We have placed boundaries around everything that exists and have even placed knowledge within artificial confines.
In itself there is no problem with this. We have come a long way on our journey since Newton and Blake.
But if we over rely on one thing as a society — on single vision — it ultimately brings us to a series of narrowing passages and dead ends. We become arbiters of limitation and in effect our own jailers.
Yet there are many ways to think and many ways to imagine and many ways to believe and comprehend and to feel and to act — it is within these that our liberation and escape is possible.
The keys to a new world are always in; our hands, our heads, our hearts.
The Garden of Potential
In The Red Queen’s Realm our world appears as her garden.
Instead of objects all things have a life.
Instead of transactions there are a myriad forms of relationship.
Instead of money, forms of energy flow to wherever they are needed.
In The Red Queen’s Garden all things grow and everything has a purpose in the growth of something else. It is a living system in its entirety. It is a developmental ecosystem.
There are no bosses nor any hierarchy. Not one thing more important than another. It is a mutuality. Together it seeks harmony.
Everything and everyone has a role in supporting and maintaining the health of the ecosystem.
An environment fit for life and culture
The Red Queen helps her garden to grow and develop.
Everything in her realm is connected to everything else. The Red Queen can see the connections between things and how one in turn gives its life and gifts to another.
We might describe The Red Queen as a permaculturalist but this would not do her justice.
Her senses perceive the life, beauty and generative potential in every place, not just in the physical world that we have so far explored with her.
The garden also makes visible the emotional, the mental and the spiritual.
Culture, language and expression. Love, compassion and care. Intelligence, art and empathy.
Her garden is one wonderful growing, singing, scented splendid thing.
To her perceptions how could any world be otherwise? For what is the purpose of life but to live well, contribute meaningfully, experience beauty and evolve!
If The Red Queen saw the world as we do she would weep.
A World of Potential Awaits
The Red Queen if she could would save us from ourselves. But she cannot. Rules are rules after all and she exists for us only as an imagining.
So this duty falls to us.
It is for our hands to till and toil. For our minds to create and dream.
It is seeing the world differently which opens up new horizons and possibilities for society, economy and culture.
It is through ecosystems and networks that we can bring The Red Queen’s Garden into existence in our own world and take it upon ourselves to nurture and care for it and each other.
It is by understanding that all things can develop, contribute and grow and that there is life in all things — that we move beyond machine like thinking and awaken ourselves from Newton’s sleep.
It is by seeing value and beauty beyond money and material things that we can ensure the vitality and survival of every cultural treasure and fruit that our civilisation has gifted us with and that our senses can enjoy.
These are the seeds of our future.
The Red Queen gifts us with her fourfold vision.
The garden is waiting for us to step outside and see it for ourselves.
