From Above, Beside and Below – The Body-Mind-Environment Perspective in Enactivism

It is fascinating seeing Uluru from above:

When you fly to Uluru, the plane did a steep banked circle above the rock so that one could get some pics of it. When you fly over it, thousands of metres above, it seems so surreal. Then when you stand beside Uluru, you can feel its immensity and how awesome it is. Here I am several kilometre away:

Then when you get up close and touch it, and see its ‘face’, you experience it again in a different way:

And, unless you have actually been there and experienced it, it is hard to describe what it’s like to walk around the world largest rock.

Uluru, is a sacred place for Australia’s First Nations Peoples. It was once called ‘Ayers Rock’ by the first white explorer, who named it after the Premier of South Australia.

When I was a child in Primary School, we were taught that Ayes Rock was discovered by explorer William Gosse. What strange indoctrination in colonialism for a sacred place that Indigenous people had known for at least 65,000 years.

Uluru is 348 metres high and 9.4 kilometres around. You can read more about Uluru here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluru

When I first went there, people were still permitted to climb it and this was permanently closed in October 2019 after being handed back to the Anangu People in 1985. Since 1950 when records were first kept about Uluru, 37 people died trying to climb it.

Even though climbing was permitted when I first was there (using a track and chain linked trail) I never felt it was right, knowing how sacred this was to First Nations People. I have always been conscious of what is sacred and of spiritual importance to others. But, here is a picture of people climbing it back in the day, even though the local Anangu People had erected signs stating ‘please don’t climb’.

When you are beside Uluru, you feel something unique and special and, it doesn’t take much to understand why it is sacred and spiritual for First Nations People. Whether you believe in a sacred metaphysical reality or not, doesn’t entitle one to disregard the beliefs and spirituality of others.

Belief, ritual, metaphysics, religion, customs and spiritual meaning are foundational to understanding culture. What is most important to culture, cannot be seen or measured and is not evident in context. (sorry HOP, context doesn’t drive culture).

How strange when you read any discussion of culture in risk and safety, this perspective is missing.

For First Nations People, the spiritual significance of Uluru is critical to culture (https://ulurutoursaustralia.com.au/blog/the-significance-of-uluru-to-australian-indigenous-culture/).

When you are beside Uluru it is one thing to feel its size, it is another to contemplate the majority of its size that cannot be seen below, at least 6 km deep. Uluru is often described like an iceberg, with what can be seen as only a small fraction of its size.

This is how we think in a triarchic way in SPoR (https://safetyrisk.net/the-triarchic-model-of-reality-a-dialectic-way-of-understanding/). We think of what is above, beside and below, when it comes to contemplating reality. We think of what can be seen and what is unseen in all we do and the dialectic between the conscious and unconscious.

In the same way we think about the body-mind-environment dimensions of reality in enactivism. In this way we think of how everything is inter-affected, inter-corporeal and inter-connected. We think of what is seen, unseen and in-between.

All of this is then applied to how we consider risk, whether it be in the physical measurable space or, the non-measurable Poetic space. This enables us to use different methods to consider risk because we bring to risk a different methodology, a methodology of enactivism.

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Please note: We have over 50 people registered for the Enactivisim and Risk Workshops in September and registrations are now closed.