When I set myself the challenge of “steering clear of oppositional states” what comes to mind is Work in the P.D. Ouspensky sense, as filtered through Maurice Nicoll (Scottish Jungian), wherein the goal is to eschew what’s called “negative emotion”.
It’s one thing to oppose in a sportsmanlike manner, as in that case we’re really on the same team in a meta-sense, i.e. we all agree to play X by the rules and may the best team win and yadda yadda.
It’s another thing to be a “sore loser” and/or want to seek vengeance and/or want to resort to “outward violence” (as we Quakers say) owing to “negative emotion”.
One of the mathy notations to come out of computer science is the dot “.”, as in “dot operator”. Object oriented languages tend to use it, and A.B connotes B inside A, i.e. container.thing_inside or context.content or namespace.name.
In other words, the left side (the subject, usually some object) is a container (like a suitcase), a namespace, a context, and then the dot (the “accessor”) allows one to single out the object (or thing) inside the subject that we wish to refer to, or call out.
The idea is especially useful in reminding us that we’re each “walking namespaces” in a way, i.e. a private (i.e. unique, proprietary) language more or less intelligible to others. We could even use proper names, to distinguish, say:
Coxeter.4D
Fuller.4D
Einstein.4D
This is to say each of the above thinkers used “4D” in an intelligible manner, and yet within distinct semantic spaces. We might want to add:
N-dimensional Euclidean geometry ala H.S.M. Coxeter (University of Toronto) has a use for “4D” that’s distinct from Fuller’s use in Synergetics (a 2-volume work, Macmillan, dedicated to Coxeter nonetheless, not oppositional), and that’s in turn different from Einstein’s “3D + Time”.
Here’s Coxeter in Regular Polytopes saying “don’t confuse my 4D with Einstein’s 4D”:
