WHAT IS GRAVITY?
It is common to consider Gravity as a field, something like magnetism. Since Einstein, this is unlikely to be the case as is demonstrated by this brief graphical description of his General Theory of Relativity:
SHORT GRAPHICAL PRESENTATION ON THE NATURE OF GRAVITY
In essence, gravity is not a thing, but rather a description of the effect of our acceleration caused by the mass of the earth distorting space as we move through the time dimension, and are pushed out of the laminar flow of space/time by the ground. What we describe as the force of gravity is really the inertia of our mass opposed by the mass of the Earth. We actually know the value of this curvature in time: Our present position is now accelerating from its prior position at a rate of 32 feet per second, every second, towards the center of mass of the Earth.
Comments on our lineage’s awareness and utilization of the temporal attribute of SpaceTime here:
TIME
IN/OUT VS. UP DOWN
Until several hundred years ago the common wisdom was that we lived on a Flat Earth at the center of the universe. The Sun moved (sunrise/sunset) and the World had edges that were unwise to approach. From the perspective of our current level of understanding that era has an autistic quality in which we were egocentrically self-focused and a paranoid quality of hypervigilance for the changing whims of said world’s creator. This remains, to this writer’s bafflement, a commonly held belief among people with access to information.
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth.
We are all crew.“
Marshall McLuhan
The frame within which we understand our surroundings changes much more slowly than the rate at which we are innovating. Many of the references we use to make sense of things, which are gifted to us by our parents and culture, are remnants of the era before the Scientific Revolution. One of these ancestral reference frameworks still universally adopted is our use of the terms UP and DOWN, we go upstairs, or down a hill. These terms are relative to a flat plane, while we now know that we actually live on the surface of a rather large sphere. A more sophisticated perspective is the use of the terms IN and OUT1 – we go outward or inward on the stairs.
At first glance, this may seem nitpicky. However, this reference frame has ramifications for how we collectively express living on our planet, as well as for how we execute moving as we interact with gravity. When thinking in IN/OUT terms the interaction between the mass of our body, and the mass upon which we are pressing has a dynamic, present moment quality. When managing our mass using the flat plane reference of UP/DOWN our perception of how we stand and move in gravity is divorced from our experience of our physiology. By consciously aligning our perception of our body’s anatomical gravitational centerline with the center of the sphere upon which we are standing, it becomes much easier to orient our center of mass to our optimal anatomical center of gravity, enabling a more vibrant experience of movement,
This misperception may also partially explain our poor results as stewards of our planet (a “flat earth” is not obviously a closed system with finite capacities, facilitating unconscionable resource depletion, pollution, and population growth). The Dymaxion Map (R. Buckminster Fuller) illustrated above is a prime example of the effort to facilitate shifting our cultural perspective to a more Ecocentric one. An excellent example of this paradigm shift in thinking is the LONG NOW FOUNDATION, with the mission to promote long term thinking in the closed system within which we live.
It is this author’s experience that habituating to IN/OUT movement patterns is challenging to teach and that it takes playing with the concept over a period of time before it begins to feel natural (you are rewriting thousands of years of ancestral cultural consensus as it expresses through your body). The reward for the effort is a more dynamic and fluid experience of standing and moving that emerges from a more accurate perceptual map of the underlying physics. An excellent place to start is to cultivate awareness of the sensations ones feet provide on how one’s body is contacting the ground
1This is one of the ideas proposed by the brilliant polymath R. Buckminster Fuller
This article is an enjoyable read on the subject discussed here:
Seeing the Whole Earth from Space Changed Everything – Ahmed Kabil