In There / Out There

At the heart of being lies a dynamic tension: a dance between a centripetal force - a drawing inwards towards a gravitational centre, a call to coherence, a return to the root of the root and the bud of the bud, a pull to the sharp clarity of one’s internal truth “in there”; and a centrifugal force directed outwards - a differentiation, expansion, and dissolution into exteriority, a pull away from the centre toward the periphery of experience “out there”.

Our experience of Self is shaped by this interplay between inward gravity and outward dispersion. In Jung’s concept of individuation, both movements are vital: the centripetal draws us to confront and integrate the depths of the unconscious, while the centrifugal propels us to move beyond our limited self-concept and confines of our habitual identity, inviting novel ways of relating with the wider world.

Thus, the Self is not a fixed point but a path traced over time - a looping, folding, diverging, and converging process underscored by phases of expansion and contraction, of growth and relinquishment. Coherence then, is not the absence of chaos, but a patterned recurrence - a dynamic order that arises as we are pulled towards a central core, even while externalising forces spin us outward into an unpredictable periphery. This brings to my mind the Self as a strange attractor, an emergent structure that gives shape to our becoming.

Lorenz attractor

In chaos theory, a strange attractor denotes a set of states toward which a system evolves, but never settles. A strange attractor is deterministic in essence, shaped by its initial conditions, yet its trajectory is unpredictable and never repeats. Despite being chaotic in appearance, it is guided by an underlying structural topology in phase space, a hidden order within the noise. It returns ceaselessly, approximating previous states, yet is never exactly the same.

This is the nature of my evolving Self, spiralling through strange yet familiar terrains, tracing new attractor basins. New forms emerging from the invisible geometry of my becoming, my choices, my intuitions, my hesitations. An endless dance between an integrated whole and the constellation of multiplicities that make my being - always spiralling and orbiting a luminous edge, never fixed, never finished.