Epilogue: Creative Self and Social World

From Being by Doing to Coordinate–Center–Gejunction

by Oliver Ding

September 15, 2026

This is the epilogue a possible book: World of Activity: The Ecological Approach to Activity Analysis & Intervention (AAI).

1

The title of this postscript echoes the title of Chapter 1. That is not an accident. "Creative Self and Social World" is a motif that has recurred throughout my creative journey — not as a topic I chose once, but as a question that kept returning, in different forms, at different scales, across different projects.

In 2022, when I first defined the World of Activity, the question was already there. I drew a square bounded by Heaven, Earth, Birth, and Death, and placed the self inside it. The self was not floating in space. It was situated. The boundary was given, but the interior was alive.

In 2023, the motif appeared again in the Creative Course framework. The World of Activity sat between the World of Works and the Creative Field. The self was inside the World of Activity; the social world was outside. The question became: how does the self move between inside and outside?

In 2024, the motif took another form. The Knowledge Center project, the Value Circle, the network of enterprises — these were attempts to understand how a creative self builds a social world around itself. Not just participates in an existing social world, but builds one.

In 2025, the motif appeared again in the Homecoming manuscript. This time it was autobiographical. The creative self and the social world were no longer abstract concepts. They were my childhood home, my parents, my son, the places I left and returned to.

Now, in 2026, the motif appears once more — this time as the underlying question of this book.

2

One year ago, in September 2025, I edited a possible book titled Being by Doing: World of Activity and Creative Life Theory (v3.0). It was 63 articles, 9 parts, over 300,000 words.

Looking back at that book now, I see something I did not see then. Being by Doing was too focused on the Creative Self. It asked how to place the Creative Self in the social world, but it did not unfold the complexity of that placement. The social world was there as a background, as a container. It was not yet a structure with its own dynamics, its own layers, its own forms.

The book was organized around the Self–Life–Mind schema, but it treated Self, Life, and Mind as three parallel dimensions. It did not yet see them as three nested layers. It did not yet see that the self's placement in the social world is not a single act, but a multi-layered unfolding.

That limitation was real. But it was also productive. It revealed a gap that later work would fill.

3

In October 2025, I took the first step toward filling that gap. Two pieces of work from that month — the Creative Life Coordinate article and The Birth of the "Self-Us-Awe" Schema — laid the foundation for what would later become the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework.

The first piece introduced a model I called the Creative Life Coordinate. It built on the Life Coordinate Framework (v2, 2023), placing six Life Containers along the "Attach–Detach" horizontal lifeflow: Environment, Creative Self, Creative Us, Value Circle, Developmental Platform, and Nature. Along the "Subject–Object" vertical lifechain, it identified four Life Focuses: Action, Project, Enterprise, and Universe.

The second piece, developed just days later, provided the conceptual foundation for this model. It proposed the Self–Us–Awe schema — a threefold expansion of creative engagement. Creative Self refers to the individual creative agent. Creative Us refers to collaborative, social creativity. Creative Awe refers to a state of interaction with nature that transcends social action.

The schema emerged from a specific theoretical move. I adopted a meta-framework from Ping-keung Lui's theoretical sociology — the schema of Subjectivity–Intersubjectivity–Otherness — and mapped it onto the domain of creative life. Subjectivity corresponded to Creative Self. Intersubjectivity corresponded to Creative Us. And Otherness opened a question: what corresponds to Otherness in Creative Life Theory? The answer was Creative Awe — the experience of engaging with phenomena beyond human articulation.

This move was itself made possible by the Attachance Theory framework, which I had been developing since 2019. Attachance Theory identifies three types of meta-attachment — Material–Social, Self–Other, and Human–Nature — and each corresponds to one of the three levels in the Self–Us–Awe schema. The Material–Social Attachance connects Environment to Creative Self. The Self–Other Attachance connects Creative Self to Creative Us. The Human–Nature Attachance connects Creative Us to Nature, the Creative Universe.

Together, these two pieces of work — the Creative Life Coordinate and the Self–Us–Awe schema — formed the early prototype of the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework. But they stayed within the Ecological Practice Approach. I did not yet know how to connect them to Creative Life Theory. The concepts were there, but the architecture was not.

4

In December 2025, while working on the Meta-frameworks manuscript, I revisited the development of the HLS framework. It was then that I naturally integrated the World of Activity and World of Life into a single whole — what is now GO Theory.

In that new theoretical landscape, the structure of Body(Self), Life(Self), and History[Life(Self)] became visible. I wrote at the time:

More interesting, I found that the History{Life[Self(Body)]} schema itself perfectly matches the Flow-Focus-Center-Circle schema:

Body → Flow (Biological impulses and sensory experiences are the source of the continuous experiential flow.)

Self → Focus (The self acts as the seat of intention, directing attention to turn flow into a thematic focus.)

Life → Center (A person tends to seek order in life, so a creative center curates activities into a meaningful whole.)

History → Circle (The movement of time and society weaves individual life into history, just like creative centers connect together into a circle.)

This match reflects the essence of the double-AAS structure: the micro level and the macro level share the same underlying logic. This discovery further validates the HLS framework's status as a meta-framework, as it demonstrates a fractal consistency across different scales of reality.

That was the moment the architecture appeared.

The HLS framework became the ontology of the World of Life (World of Activity) Approach. Later, in 2026, it unfolded as a theoretical platform to support several knowledge projects, which brought new insights that echo the nested structure.

5

In the first quarter of 2026, while working within this new landscape, I conducted the Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS) project. One dimension of that project was the Ontology of Thematic Creation. I proposed three concepts: Mindentity, Folktentity, and Worldentity.

Mindentity is the first principle of thematic creation: all results of thematic creation exist first as Mindentities, anchored in the creator's psychological ownership, prior to any external reward, recognition, or collective engagement.

Folktentity is the missing middle: the ontological status of thematic creations that have entered collective life as active objects of Cultural Projection. A Folktentity is collectively held, collectively reproduced, and collectively developed.

Worldentity is the cultural givenness of thematic creation: the ontological status of creations that have transcended their creators and communities to become given structures in the World of Life.

The theoretical foundation for this spectrum is Attachance Theory and the Self–Us–Awe schema. The three meta-attachments — Material–Social, Self–Other, Human–Nature — correspond to the three domains of creative life: Self, Us, and Awe.

These three concepts also resonate with the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework. The Mindentity corresponds to the Living Coordinate (Body/Self), where a creative result exists within the creator's psychological ownership. The Folktentity corresponds to the Creative Center (Life/Self), where the creation enters collective life and is sustained by a community. The Worldentity corresponds to the Gejunction (History/Life/Self), where the creation becomes a given structure in the World of Life. But the Gejunction has not yet reached the stage of Otherness. Creative Awe has not yet truly appeared in my theoretical system. The Worldentity points toward that horizon.

Because this book focuses on the World of Activity, I have not included the articles on the Ontology of Thematic Creation here. Readers interested in that dimension can find them in Anticipatory Cultural Sociology: Creation, Projection, and Agency (Possible Book, 2026). In the future, if a suitable case arises, I will use this model for case analysis and include it in the knowledge frameworks recommended by AAI.

6

While the Ontology of Thematic Creation was being developed in the ACS project, another line of work was moving in parallel. In the first half of 2026, the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework gradually developed. The concept of Gejunction, with its four corresponding knowledge systems — Thematic Spaces, Living Coordinates, RelationFields, Weave-points — matured over those months. It provided the direct foundation for the framework's birth.

In July 2026, during a trip to China, I stayed in Fuzhou and wrote the outline for the twenty-lecture series on Activity Analysis and Intervention. In that outline, I clearly articulated the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework for the first time. What had been implicit across years of work became explicit in a single document.

After that trip, I began writing a Chinese book manuscript titled An Shen Li Ming: Coordinate, Center, and Gejunction (安身立命：坐标、中心和格局). The title borrows a classical Chinese phrase — "安身立命" — which means to settle oneself and find one's place in life. The book was written for Chinese readers, bringing the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework into dialogue with Confucian terms and ideas that have shaped Chinese thought for centuries.

One chapter from that manuscript, "修齐治平" (Xiu Qi Zhi Ping), serves as an example. It begins with the eight steps from The Great Learning (《大学》) — 格物、致知、诚意、正心、修身、齐家、治国、平天下 — and reads them as a nested model of activity: each step is a container for the next, moving from the innermost self outward to the world. The chapter then introduces the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework as a parallel structure: Living Coordinate corresponds to the inner cultivation of the self; Creative Center corresponds to the extension into family and community; Gejunction corresponds to the broader grasp of one's standing in the social world. The two models share the same structural intuition — from inner to outer, layer by layer. But the framework does not prescribe the content of that unfolding. It does not require that the endpoint be "governing the state" or "pacifying the world." It only describes the form through which any life, whatever its content, becomes a World of Activity.

The cover of the manuscript is a photograph I took during a later trip. It shows Ganlu Temple (甘露岩寺) in Taining, Fujian — a temple built inside a rock cave, supported by a single independent pillar that holds up the entire structure above it. I had visited the place, taken the photo, and only later, after finishing the manuscript, remembered the image and chose it for the cover. A single pillar, holding up a whole world, inside a cave. It seemed to capture something about the framework — the coordinate as a single point, the center as what grows from it, the gejunction as the whole that becomes visible.

7

Creative Self and Social World.

The phrase names a relationship, not two separate things. The Creative Self is not an individual isolated from society. The Social World is not an external environment that the self reacts to. They are constituted together, through activity. The self becomes creative by engaging with the social world. The social world becomes a world — rather than a chaos — by being engaged with by creative selves.

This is what the World of Activity approach has been trying to say from the beginning. The self is not a substance. It is a position within a World of Activity. The social world is not a structure imposed from outside. It is the horizon within which Worlds of Activity connect and form Circles.

The Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework is one way to describe this relationship. The Living Coordinate is where the self is located within the social world. The Creative Center is what the self builds within that location. The Gejunction is how the self grasps the whole — its own standing, and the social world it inhabits.

But the framework is not the relationship. It is a map of the relationship. The relationship itself is lived. It is what each creative self does, every day, in every project, in every interaction.

8

Returning to Ping-keung Lui's theoretical sociology — the schema of Subjectivity–Intersubjectivity–Otherness — the Coordinate–Center–Gejunction framework has reached the stage of intersubjectivity, but it has not yet reached the stage of otherness.

Lui's schema is not an isolated invention. It is inspired by the development of the phenomenological tradition itself. Husserl focused on subjectivity — the structure of conscious experience as it is given to the individual. Schutz extended phenomenology into sociology, shifting the focus to intersubjectivity — the shared world of meaning that emerges between subjects. Levinas made otherness a central problem, and his example of death points to a kind of otherness that cannot be assimilated into the self's projects or intentions. 

Lui's schema condenses this trajectory into three terms. But the third term remains the hardest. In sociology, how to handle otherness is itself an unsolved problem. According to my research on Lui's creative life, he and his collaborators have not yet satisfactorily resolved this challenge.

The World of Activity approach has its own gestures toward otherness, but they do not yet constitute a systematic response. The four boundaries of the World of Activity — Heaven, Earth, Birth, Death — are not social constructions. They are given. They frame every World of Activity from the outside, prior to any act of choice or will. Heaven and Earth define the spatial and conceptual limits; Birth and Death define the temporal ones. These four givens are where otherness first appears — not as another person, but as the horizon that no subject can transcend.

The World of Life adds another dimension. One of its four boundaries is Spirituality — the domain of ultimate meaning, transcendence, and that which exceeds human articulation. This boundary echoes the concern of otherness. It points to the same horizon that Creative Awe tries to name.

But these are gestures, not a theory. The World of Activity approach currently introduces Creative Awe through the House of Flow Dynamics — as a mode of experience that appears within the stream of activity. This is not yet a formal theoretical solution. It is a beginning.

v1.0 — September 15, 2026 - 2,491 words