Liquid Time

The World according to Miki Dora

Dan Webber — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:25:45 +0000

“My whole life is this escape. My whole life is this wave I drop into, set the whole thing up, pull up a bottom turn, pull up into it and shoot for my life, going for broke man. And behind me all this shit goes over my back, the screaming parents, teachers, screaming teachers, police, priests, politicians, knee-boarders, wind surfers, they’re all going over the falls head first into the reef, head first into the fucking reef, waaa, and I’m shooting for my life and when it starts to close out, I pull up from the bottom out to the back and I pick up another one and I do the same God damn thing.”

- MIKI DORA

Signification

Dan Webber — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:54:39 +0000

My mother sat me at a table, placed a pen in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me. I think I’d seen a pen in action already. However, I’m not sure if I had understood its purpose, or perhaps even that it had a purpose. I remember holding the pen vertically upon the page and watching closely as it rolled on its ball point, leaving a blue line where it had been. I remember the state of absorption. But, I also remember how suddenly it stopped, which is, I suppose, why I have come to remember the event. It stopped because I suddenly became aware of my mother watching what I was doing, for in that instant my involvement shifted from being one of absorption to being a performance. As if to indicate that I had command over its function, I immediately increased the speed of the pen. I wanted to give the impression that it was not a new thing to me. Then my mother suggested I draw something. Since I had already drawn a line, I figured that more was required for a drawing to be a ‘something’. So, just below the line, I confidently scribbled around and around; that is, until my mother asked: What is it? This stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know what I had drawn. I thought I was drawing something, but didn’t know that that something had to refer to something other than itself! Oh, how I remember being caught off guard. Eventually, with my mother’s vocabulary, I decided that the line was a hill and the scribble was a cave.

Biomimicry

Dan Webber — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:16:17 +0000

Biomimicry is a design principle that draws inspiration from natural patterns and processes. Numerous surfboard shapers have developed designs based on naturally occurring shapes. George Greenough is said to have modeled his revolutionary fin design on the tail fin of the bluefin tuna. In this instance, the application is more or less identical to the source of its inspiration. However, there need not be an obvious correspondence between the natural form that gives the inspiration and the product developed from that inspiration. Often, the correspondence has to do with an underlying principle influencing efficiency. For example, a more efficient fan blade has been designed using the logarithmic spiral found in the shells of mollusks.

Of course, natural forms can be incorporated into designs simply for their aesthetic appeal. So long as it invokes a desired response, one could argue that such features serve a function of sorts, especially when the purpose is to attract a mate (or, by extension, a customer). However, the evolution of form in living tissue often reveals traces of the physical forces acting on the organism (as distinct from social forces).

The underlying argument is that the evolution of biological form is founded on generic physical forces, which presumably served as morphological templates within which genetic selection could operate. Many unrelated organisms have morphological features similar to physical forms. For example, the logarithmic spiral found in seashells is also evident in the spiraling of tidal-washed kelp fronds and in the shape of our own skin pores, through which water vapor escapes. (3)

Nature’s solution to a problem often seems counter-intuitive. For example, the smooth surface of the lotus leaf actually has microscopic crevices, which serve to repel water by trapping a cushion of air that prevents water sticking to the leaf. This principle has been applied to glass, fabric and paint, to aid in the cleaning of their surfaces. (4) Similarly, the rough skin of a shark has been found to reduce drag, which not only makes swimming more efficient, but also quieter, aiding its stealth.

The humpback whale seems to defy basic principles of hydrodynamic efficiency in the design of its flippers, which have large irregular shaped bumps on the leading edges. Wind tunnel tests have demonstrated that, compared to smooth flippers, these bumps produce a 40% increase in the angle of attack. (5) By channeling the flow of water, these bumps enable humpbacks to ‘grip’ the water and hence turn at tighter angles.

Innovative designers are inspired by the possibility of discovering an altogether radically different approach to a design problem. Biomimicry enables them to take advantage of the millions of years of incremental variations made through biological evolution to gain insight into the underlying principles determining naturally evolved shapes.

Dan Webber

References

1. Benyus, J.M. (1997), Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature, William Morrow & Co., New York, NY.

2. Newman, S.A. (1992), Generic physical mechanisms of morphogenesis and pattern formation as determinants in the evolution of multicellular organization, J. Biosci., Vol.17, Number 3, pp193-215.

3. Newman, S.A. (1992), Generic physical mechanisms of morphogenesis and pattern formation as determinants in the evolution of multicellular organization, J. Biosci., Vol.17, Number 3, pp193-215.

4. Biomimicry Institute: Learning from Lotus Plants How to Clean without Cleaners.

5. Biomimicry Institute: Learning from Humpback Whales How to Create Efficient Wind Power.

Present moment awareness

Dan Webber — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:46:48 +0000

“Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of space.” – Henri Bergson

The difference between spatial and temporal relations hinges on the orientation of the subject relative to the object. It is our detached perspective that portrays time as a continual stream of events. Events are objectified, in the sense that they stand in relation to time, as if the event is in the foreground and time is in the background. With present moment awareness, events are subjectified, in the sense that they stand in relation to each other, with temporality viewed only in terms of events that are before and after each other.

The subjectification of temporality suspends the separation of subject and object responsible for viewing the world in terms of ideas. Ideas are, first and foremost, hypotheses that enable people to collaborate in problem solving activities. Empowered by language, we deal with reality in objective terms. However, our experience of the world remains transient, because, in essence, we are transient, which is terrifying if thought of objectively. But, subjectively, experientially, this is the core of our being. As paradoxical as it seems, the fluid present is the only stable perspective.

We only fear transience when we look at it objectively. In essence, the problem is not the transience, but the perspective that renders it objectively. Although fear of transience seems to equate with fear of death, the threat is not gauged by the danger itself, but rather by our inability to determine the nature of the danger and how best to respond (Montell, 2002, p.12). Although the threat posed by our own transience is an illusion, the more we try to interpret it the more our inability to gauge the threat increases our fear of it. The fear is real. But, it is also pointless, because transience is not an object that can be interpreted separate from ourselves. On the contrary, objectivity conceals transience, as Heidegger (1925) explains:

“Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.” (Heidegger, 1962, p.43)

Heidegger views philosophy as a means of destroying ordinary everyday meanings of words like time, history, being, theory, death, mind, body, matter, logic, etc. By orienting ourselves to an objective reality, the truth is presented as a neutral fact belonging to what Heidegger calls the they-self. It suits our everyday circumstances to subscribe to the they-self, but it is an inauthentic existence, plagued by angst. Unlike fear, angst is not oriented to an object, but rather to an uncanny sense of one’s own detached perspective.

Heidegger defines this problem in terms of our attitude to death. In ordinary everyday discussions, the they-self views death as a mundane fact, which inadvertently hides its actual relevance to one’s own presence. Angst challenges us to recognise life’s finitude; a call of conscience from the self wanting to be itself. In a moment of vision, the self is revealed from a new perspective, which simultaneously reveals that the they-self had been distracting the self from the self.

The they-self is hidden from awareness, because its operation is akin to using a tool, where the tool becomes an extension of the self and is absorbed into the task being performed. Similarly, one’s perspective becomes absorbed into the task of judging spatial relations, which thereby conceal the source of the perspective, which is the immediacy of optic flow. The they-self separates the self from its immediate context, in the same way an observer’s perspective is separated from the space observed. To break through the they-self, we need to recognise our own complicity in neglecting the temporal source.

Dan Webber

Regeneration

Dan Webber — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:03:01 +0000

My ten year old daughter rides a 7’6″ soft board. We surf together inside the mouth of the Richmond River, where a sand spit juts seaward from an island in the middle of the estuary. Alexandra’s enthusiasm is contagious, although her little brother, Christopher, still prefers the safety of dry land. He’s only five. It’s an idyllic setting just five minutes from home, in the middle of Ballina. It means a lot to me personally, because we are a broken family divided into two very different worlds, governed by two very different approaches to life. Basically, I just want to go surfing.

On the northern bank of the river, there sits an outcrop of basalt columns, which are the remnants of a 20 million year old lava flow, from when Mount Warning was an active volcano. As we wait for the set, I tell Alexandra about the local geology, kind of hoping to put things in a perspective far beyond the petty struggles of her frustrated parents. I explain that when igneous rocks meet sedimentary, a completely new type of rock is created, called metamorphic rock. The extreme heat causes a recrystalisation of the minerals in the rock, which becomes much harder, but still retains its layered structure. Then, I notice she is paddling for a wave and I am elated that she has discovered the ocean.

Dan Webber

Dakini: Goddess of Wisdom

Dan Webber — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:07:34 +0000

Long before I knew anything about Buddhism, I had an extraordinary dream in which a Goddess appeared in the sky and spoke to me. Although I was amazed by the dream, it did not dramatically influence my outlook on life. But, I think it probably did resonate in a subliminal way to influence my spiritual journey.

Throughout childhood, I experienced lucid dreams (when you know you are dreaming) and I had limited success in controlling the course of these dream. I often dreamt of animals, sometimes wild animals chasing me. Some of these dreams were also lucid. So, I challenged myself to stand my ground and on one occasion, the wild animal became friendly and we sort of merged.

In another recurring dream, I would be rushing to go for a surf, frantically looking for my surfboard. Sometimes, I would recognise the situation and hence realise that I was dreamimg. So, I decided to confront this frustration by trying to meditate within the dream.

When I realised that I was having the dream, I climbed onto a picnic table overlooking the surf and sat down to meditate. The sun was disappearing behind a bank of clouds over the horizon and, suddenly, great beams of light shone upward from behind the clouds and there appeared within the light a Hindu sort of Goddess with many arms. I noticed a tight group of symbols crossing the sky in my direction. As it sailed across my field of view, I sensed the meanings attached to the symbols, but they did not register as sound. Instead, their message seemed to resonate inside my body.

I woke up and immediately tried to remember the message, so I could write it down. I felt certain that I had understood the message, but my words seemed inadequate. Eventually, I settled on the message meaning something like: “Just ask and you will be answered”. But, I wasn’t completely satisfied with this translation, because the message seemed to have been slightly different. I just couldn’t express it any better than that.

Apart from surfing in Indonesia, my contact with Eastern cultures had been almost non-existent. So, I was shocked to discover, many years later, that the Goddess who appeared in my dream corresponded to Dakini, a Goddess depicted in clouds, holding a bow that shoots a flower symbolising wisdom!

Dakini – Goddess of Wisdom

The Door

Dan Webber — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 03:57:25 +0000

When we still the mind, we become aware of a door forced shut by thoughts. As if by magic, the door opens to reveal the spiritual realm. We desire to enter it, but soon discover that we can’t. This frustrates us, because it seems that the physical and spiritual worlds are incompatible. But this is not true! We are the door, and our task is to be open, so the spiritual world can enter the physical world.

- Daniel Webber