Jerry Swatez

Thinking the Float Tank – Friday, August 25, 2023 (Day 2)

You are Your Own Boundary Conditions

Speaker Bio:

Jerry Swatez holds degrees in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, respectively, from University of Minnesota (BA), Penn State (MA), and University of California, Berkeley (PhD). His dissertation research was on the intersection of contrary constraints imposed on a high-energy physics research team by bureaucratic organization and the scientific method with its ethos. After a year of research at the University of Chicago Industrial Relations Center, he taught Sociology for several years at University of Illinois, Chicago. While there, he co-edited a book of readings entitled The Quality of Life in America: Pollution, Poverty, Power & Fear. He did research on the confrontation between large-organization approaches to boundaries and mass-movement approaches, producing a film report, Conventions: The Land Around Us (available on YouTube). After attending an Esalen workshop with John Lilly on interspecies communication, where he was introduced to Tai Chi Ch’uan and Laws of Form, he traveled throughout Mexico with his spouse and sons, searching for the mythical Don Juan for a sabbatical project on The Significance of Spiritual Discipline for Social Change. While there, on a deserted beach near Tulum, he entered the Void and his vehicle exchanged essences with an iguana. In 1973, with some colleagues and their families, he founded the Syzygy Cooperative Community on an Island in the Salish Sea. In 1987, he moved to California to work at two holistic healing centers and then to return to college teaching, online. He is currently living in the Arizona desert near the site of two rivers crossing called by the natives there Ts-iuk-shan.

Abstract:

The Laws of Form can be construed as foundational for a phenomenology. That is because the Laws of Form delineate the nature of the possibility of certain kinds of experience, perhaps of all distinctively human experience. And this talk might have been titled: “You are your own boundary,” because the last sentence in Chapter 12 of the text of Laws of Form is: “We see now that the first distinction, the mark, and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical.” However, in the world it’s more complicated than that, more complicated than the logic and mathematics of the first distinction. (This is not to deny the possibility that those complications may ultimately be derivable from that logic and mathematics.)

Boundary conditions affect what occurs at boundaries, e.g., transition rules, energy exchanges and transformations, materiality details, complicated symbolic substitutions, not just what can cross a boundary or how, but also what is allowed or required adjacent to or in the neighborhood of a boundary. In other words, boundary conditions include elaborations of what can and cannot occur at the border.

This talk aims toward a philosophy of borders.